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Archēglyph

CARE principles

Also: CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance

Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics — principles for Indigenous data governance that complement FAIR by asking whom data serves and who decides.

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The CARE principles were released by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance in 2019. Where FAIR is about data, CARE is about people and purpose: Collective benefit (data should serve the communities they come from), Authority to control (those communities have a say in how data about them are governed), Responsibility (those who work with the data are accountable to the communities), and Ethics (the rights and wellbeing of the communities come first, across the whole life of the data).

Why it matters for your research. Many archives were made about communities by institutions those communities did not control — colonial administrations, missionary presses, collecting libraries. Digitising those archives, and computing over them, raises exactly the questions CARE asks: who benefits, who decides, who is accountable. CARE was written by and for Indigenous peoples, and it should not be stretched to speak for communities it was not written by; but its questions are good ones to ask of any archive shaped by empire.

In Archēglyph. Today, a collection stays private until its owner publishes it, and the owner can download, unpublish or delete it at any time; every line derived from a source says what produced it. Shared stewardship of a collection with the community it comes from is on the project roadmap as an aim, not yet a feature — the method page is candid about the difference.

Not to be confused with. The FAIR principles, which ask whether data can be found and reused, not whom they serve. The two are designed to be used together.

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