Apache Superset
Apache Superset is a modern, enterprise-ready business intelligence platform that provides rich data visualization and exploration capabilities. It supports a wide variety of visualizations, from simple to complex charts, and allows users to create interactive dashboards. Superset is designed to be intuitive for both technical and non-technical users, making it ideal for sharing insights across diverse stakeholder groups.
Available Templates
This page provides links to XLSForm templates designed for common data collection objectives by Indigenous community organizations. These templates can be used in KoboToolbox, ODK Central, or any other XLSForm-compatible platform.
Best Practices and Usage Tips
This page covers practical lessons learned from using KoboToolbox in real-world scenarios, including common pitfalls and their solutions.
CoMapeo
CoMapeo is an offline-first mapping and data collection tool designed specifically for indigenous communities and grassroots organizations. Built with a focus on data sovereignty and community control, CoMapeo allows communities to map their territories, document environmental changes, and collect evidence of environmental impacts without relying on external internet infrastructure.
Common Workflows
Reference information for common tasks that involve Guardian Connector and related tools.
Companion Applications
Documentation for external applications that are useful alongside Guardian Connector but are not themselves part of the Guardian Connector platform or directly integrated into it.
Core Integrations
Guardian Connector is designed to work closely with a small number of external applications that are commonly used within Indigenous community monitoring and data management workflows. These integrations allow data collected or processed in other tools to be brought into Guardian Connector for storage, management, analysis, visualization, and longer-term use.
Custom Applications
Beyond the core toolkit, Guardian Connector instances can include additional services that support specialized workflows. These tools are optional: deploy them when a project needs a custom web experience, wildlife media exploration, or another capability that is not covered by GC Explorer or Superset alone.
Data Sharing Protocols Grounded in Indigenous Data Sovereignty
This guide establishes an overview, actionable steps, guiding questions, and a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) template to support the secure, ethical, and community-driven sharing of Indigenous and local community data.
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:
File Browser
File Browser is a web-based file manager that allows users to browse, upload, download, and share files from their Guardian Connector instance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Guardian Connector open source?
GC Explorer
Guardian Connector Explorer (GC Explorer) is a web-based data visualization tool that transforms your community's tabular data into interactive maps, galleries, and dashboards. Built specifically for Guardian Connector, it connects directly to your PostgreSQL database to display data collected from tools like CoMapeo, KoboToolbox, and other data collection platforms.
GC Landing Page
The Guardian Connector Landing Page is the home page for your community's Guardian Connector: the front door you arrive at after signing in. It brings everything together in one place, so you don't need to remember web addresses or hunt around for the right tool.
Guardian Connector "User Personas" Explained
Understanding the diverse user personas who interact with Guardian Connector and their varying technical expertise levels
Guiding Questions for Creating a Data Sharing Protocol
This information is adapted from “Technocultural Data Protocols” from Foster & Schonwetter 2024, produced for the Tenure Facility.
Incidents
Incidents in GC Explorer let you group different alerts and secondary dataset observations together when they are about the same event on the ground.
Introduction
Welcome to the guides & tutorials section of the Guardian Connector documentation! This section provides comprehensive, step-by-step guidance to help Indigenous community organizations make the most of the tools and workflows available across the Guardian Connector ecosystem.
Introduction
This reference section documents the components, concepts, integrations, and technical conventions that make up Guardian Connector. It is intended as a place to look up how different parts of the platform work, how they relate to one another, and the terminology and structures used throughout the system.
Is Guardian Connector Right for Your Organization?
This page is for you if you're trying to decide whether Guardian Connector could be a good fit for your organization, or for a community organization you know or support, to help better manage data and information in support of protecting land, traditions, and future.
KoboToolbox
KoboToolbox is a free, open-source suite of tools for mobile data collection. It allows users to build forms, collect data in the field using mobile devices, and analyze the collected data through web-based interfaces. Originally developed for humanitarian contexts, KoboToolbox excels at creating surveys, questionnaires, and data collection forms that work reliably in challenging environments with limited connectivity.
KoboToolbox: Data Management Syllabus
Overview
Local Contexts: Annotating Datasets with TK/BC Labels
Local Contexts Labels
Pillars of Data Sovereignty in Guardian Connector
While data sovereignty, and Indigenous data sovereignty in particular, are important principles for Guardian Connector, it is not the sole objective. Guardian Connector is first and foremost a digital platform to enable Indigenous guardianship, and data sovereignty is one of the grounding design principles that supports this.
Preparing Mining Alert Field Briefings
Introduction
Reading List on Indigenous Data Sovereignty
📄 Academic Papers
Sobre o Guardian Connector
O Guardian Connector é uma plataforma gratuita e de código aberto para a soberania de dados indígenas, que permite às comunidades centralizar, acessar e extrair informações de seus dados ambientais e culturais de forma segura. Desenvolvido por meio da colaboração entre comunidades indígenas, a Conservation Metrics e parceiros técnicos, o Guardian Connector aborda os desafios únicos enfrentados pelas comunidades na linha de frente da proteção de seus territórios.
Step 1: Set up a Local Contexts Hub Project and labels
Official onboarding for the Hub is documented by Local Contexts: Getting started on the Hub. The steps below are what Guardian Connector expects before you Fetch Labels from the Local Contexts Hub.
Step 2: Fetch Labels from the Local Contexts Hub
After you have a Hub project and approved labels, use Windmill (which is that powers the GC Scripts Hub) to pull those labels into the data warehouse.
Step 3: Apply Local Contexts Labels to a dataset
Prerequisite: Labels must already exist in the data warehouse from the previous step, Fetch Labels from the Local Contexts Hub.
Step 4: Using the Labels
After you apply Labels to a dataset, Guardian Connector stores the mapping in the data warehouse so other tools can treat Local Contexts as first-class metadata—not only inside Windmill.
Survey Design Best Practices
This page captures practical, field-tested guidance for designing robust XLSForms for use in KoboToolbox and ODK. The focus is on avoiding common pitfalls and reducing downstream data cleaning and analysis overhead.
Template: Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for Data Sharing
Between: [Community or Organization Name]
Timelapse
Timelapse is a specialized software tool designed for analyzing camera trap images and videos in wildlife research and conservation. It provides powerful features for organizing, viewing, and analyzing large collections of wildlife images, including species identification, behavior analysis, and temporal pattern recognition. Designed to be accessible to users without scientific expertise, Timelapse is particularly valuable for long-term wildlife monitoring studies and biodiversity assessments.
Week 1: Introduction to KoboToolbox
🎯 Objectives
Week 2: Managing Surveys and Data in KoboToolbox
🎯 Objectives
Week 3: Data Analysis and Visualization
🎯 Objectives
Week 4: Data Cleaning
🎯 Objectives
Week 5: Final Project
This week is designed to be a culmination of the skills and knowledge you've acquired throughout the program, allowing you to design and execute a complete survey project. Here’s a detailed breakdown of each component: