Building equity, diversity, and sovereignty into data infrastructures
How to build equity, diversity, and sovereignty into data infrastructures is the critical issue of our time. Join Mighty Red Barn for a webinar co-sponsored by Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA), the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network (USIDSN), and ORCID on 20 August 2020 to learn more about tools that you can use today that support indigenous data sovereignty.
I love museums. I can spend hours wandering through exhibits, reading narratives and looking at labels, imagining how an item was created and why, and how it connects to other items. I am always aware that I am dependent upon the information that an institution tells me and know that there is a lot missing or has been left out. Over the years, the exhibits have changed as more information is incorporated, and leading to sometimes substantial shifts in my understanding of the world. These paradigm shifts include global patterns of human migration and trade that existed well before the first millennium. The role of disease in colonization of the Americas. The importance of local language for describing experience.
The conceptualization of the relationship between “self” and “identity” is another paradigm shift I’ve experienced.
Self and (not vs.) Community
Over the last 8 years, I worked to build ORCID, a platform and promote the use of digital identifiers for scholars and researchers. The goal was to enable an individual to “get credit for their work”. During this time, I was approached by a Māori community representative, who asked “What about community rights?” Coming out of the biomedical research world, it was drilled into me that discovery and individual credit is all-important. Sure, you can work in a team, but Individual discovery kudos, such as first-authorship on research papers, is directly tied to career success …
How to build equity, diversity, and sovereignty into data infrastructures is the critical issue of our time.
-ENRICH
This apparent paradigm conflict led me to explore and challenge my notions of individual identity and control. What does it mean to be part of a community? How can either or both be credited with developing an idea, or creating a work of art? Could community rights be accommodated within a platform built for individual acknowledgement? How can this work when the community has historically been marginalized or suppressed?
Equity and Ethics of Knowledge
Individuals and communities must work together on processes of engagement around identity and credit. I agree with the founders of ENRICH that determining how to build equity, diversity, and sovereignty into data infrastructures is the critical issue of our time. Much of the (Western-inspired) scholarly community has been focused on the equity angle through enabling broad community access to research publications, an effort known as Open Access. The same community has developed a commendable set of principles to enable access to research data and promote trust in research findings. Known as the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusability) Principles, they focus on machine readability of research data. In other words FAIR focuses on the data - not the relationships integral to the making of data.
Noticeably missing in FAIR is a discussion of ethics and sovereignty. Openness and Sovereignty conceptually are diametrically opposed. One proposes universal access and the other community control. Layered on top of this, the (Western-inspired) scholarly community has a long history of misrepresenting Indigenous knowledge and innovation through a European logic of ‘discovery’. For example: credit for a collection of artifacts goes to the scholar who collected them and not the community that created them. Nor are community use requirements reflected. Given this history, it is to be expected that Indigenous communities view “Openness” with skepticism.
Building Information Infrastructure that Handles Tension
How to bring these two concepts together, not to necessarily resolve them, but so that their inherent tensions can be more visible and engaged? The Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA) have developed the CARE principles for Indigenous data governance. These include Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics, and are complementary to the FAIR principles. Supporting the application of CARE principles are Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) Labels, an extra-legal protocol and provenance mechanism developed by Local Contexts. These Labels establish equity by embedding Indigenous rights and interests within digital infrastructures.
CARE principles and TK and BC Labels are being adopted around the world by cultural heritage organizations, collections managers, scholars, and local communities to enhance and legitimize locally based decision-making and Indigenous governance frameworks for determining ownership, access, and culturally appropriate conditions for sharing historical, contemporary and future collections of cultural, biological and genetic heritage and associated data.
Learn More
Want to learn more? I invite you to join the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA), the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network (USIDSN), and ORCID on 20 August 2020 at 1600 US Eastern for Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Activating Policy and Practice, a webinar showcasing how cultural heritage, research, and government organizations are implementing CARE and TK/BC Label frameworks and tools and legitimizing Indigenous involvement in data governance.
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