Design Principles
In designing Guardian Connector for long-term viability and sustainability, we adhere to a strict set of principles. The tools included in the solution must meet the following criteria:
🔥 Indigenous Guardianship
Guardian Connector is designed first and foremost to support Indigenous-led guardianship of lands, waters, cultures, and communities. Technology should respond to priorities defined by Indigenous organizations themselves and strengthen the work they are already doing, rather than introduce new systems for their own sake. Tools, workflows, and features should therefore be grounded in practical guardianship needs, such as territorial monitoring, biodiversity stewardship, cultural knowledge, community planning, and informed decision-making.
📦 Free or Affordable Software, Hardware and Services
As much as possible, we prioritize tools that are free to use and hardware or cloud-based services that are available at low cost. This ensures the long-term sustainability of the system for our partners.
🌐 Translatable to Local Languages
While translating an entire tool interface may not always be feasible or necessary, the most critical elements should be translatable to local languages to ensure comprehension and usability.
🔒 Data Sovereignty and Control
Indigenous data sovereignty means the inherent rights and interests that Indigenous Peoples have in relation to the creation, collection, access, analysis, interpretation, management, dissemination, reuse and control of data relating to Indigenous Peoples. In the context of Indigenous data sovereignty, data are considered a strategic resource, and a framework for their ethical use is required to advance Indigenous Peoples’ collective well-being and self-determination. Restoring control over data, including that which was previously collected from Indigenous Peoples without their consent, should be recognized as a form of remedy for addressing historical injustices and correcting false narratives. This includes the establishment of effective mechanisms for data repatriation.
From the UN Human Rights Council's Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples "Right of Indigenous Peoples to data, including with regard to data collection and disaggregation"
In alignment with the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance and the UN Human Rights Council's Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Right of Indigenous Peoples to data, including with regard to data collection and disaggregation study, our partners must be able to:
- Own the infrastructure where data is stored
- Control data collection, storage, and transmission across the project lifecycle
- Access their data at all times
- Be assured that no external parties have unauthorized access to their data
- Make their own decisions about sharing data with third parties
- Opt out or remove their data from the system at any time with minimal friction
These rights are fundamental and non-negotiable.
➡️ For more information, see Pillars of Data Sovereignty in Guardian Connector.
👥 Community-Operable Software Stack
While not every persona will be able to use every tool, we aim to select tools that can realistically be operated by people within our co-creation partner teams at different levels of technical complexity. Some tools or configurations may initially require support from a technical service provider, while organizational users can take on more advanced aspects over time based on their skills, interests, and needs. Tools should be accessible, learnable, and maintainable, with clear pathways toward greater local ownership.
🏠 Self-Hosting Capability
Although Conservation Metrics maintains cloud-based Guardian Connector instances available to co-creation partners (and in the future, to others, under a to-be-determined affordable fee-for-service model), we are committed to building a toolchain that can be fully self-hosted. This includes:
- Avoiding proprietary solutions that are inaccessible to partners
- Providing sufficient documentation and automation to enable independent setup and administration
- Ensuring compatibility with a wide range of hosting platforms (e.g., Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, and country-specific clouds) or on-premises (locally hosted) infrastructure
This enables deployment in specific jurisdictions according to community organization needs.
🔗 Built for Interoperability and Extension
Even as we commit to a focused stack of integrated tools, our system must remain open and flexible. We will structure our data storage and APIs to enable easy integration of third-party tools in the future. This makes it easier for partners to plug in complementary systems as their needs evolve.