Research on Indigenous Data Governance Protocols: A toolkit for working with Indigenous Knowledge

Data governance trends increasingly emphasize the need to open access to data, despite growing concerns over data privacy, control and surveillance. Indigenous peoples, with different epistemological traditions for the use and sharing of culturally sensitive information, add the additional concern of people’s ability to exert data sovereignty. Thus, while interest grow on the documentation and use of Indigenous knowledge, current data governance trends do not align well with Indigenous data rights and governance rules. This is the case of data on Indigenous peoples’ perceptions of climate change impacts collected under the LICCI project (771056-LICCI-ERC-2017-COG). While adhering to the highest EU ethical standards, data collected under the LICCI project failed to address Indigenous data governance. To develop a set of tools to guide the management of Indigenous knowledge and data in the open while adhering to Indigenous data governance principles, in this project, I will conduct “Research on Indigenous Data Governance Protocols” (RIDaGoP). In partnership with organizations working on Indigenous data governance issues, RIDaGoP will undertake four activities in 18 months: i) a literature review to document Indigenous data governance protocols; ii) an assessment on requirements to operationalize Indigenous data sovereignty in an open context; iii) the development and testing of features to operationalize Indigenous data sovereignty; and iv) the dissemination of results. RIDaGoP will facilitate the configuration and use of Indigenous data sovereignty protocols, allowing knowledge holders to set granular terms of access and use of data and to track data usage. RIDaGoP has the potential to reframe how datasets concerning Indigenous peoples are managed and how Indigenous peoples are represented. Beyond Indigenous data sovereignty, RIDaGoP innovation in tackling equity in data governance can be upscale to issues such as national statistics or health.