The People’s Data Project started as an exploration of data rights principles that could serve grassroots communities on the Gulf Coast on Karankawa and Esto’k Gna land commonly known as Houston, Texas. Through a year of partnering with local organizers and nonprofits to better understand their data needs, the Project was launched to help individuals and organizations embed data rights practices into their community-based work.
Whether you are advocating for policies to improve the lives of members of your community, or fighting to tell a different story from the one represented by dominant systems of power, data rights can help you fight back against dominant knowledge and storytelling paradigms that exist throughout corporate, government, and academic institutions.
The People’s Data Project draws heavily from Indigenous Data Sovereignty principles developed and practiced by Indigenous peoples from Aotearoa to Turtle Island. You can read more about Maori Data Sovereignty practices through Te Mana Raraunga. Primarily, data rights principles in our resources draw from notions of self-determination and land stewardship for communities to define and apply data to protect themselves and their environment.
How much of your community’s data is stored within systems that actively work against their well-being? How many institutions enter your community to extract information without mutual benefit?
The People’s Data Project is a collective effort of learning and experimentation to begin answering these questions by applying a data rights lens to our community data environments. Partners of the Project add to the work by seeding experiments in their own communities and co-creating resources to share learning across places.
In 2024, the first collaborating partners of the People’s Data Project were Bayou City Waterkeeper and the Open Environmental Data Project. We are also seeding multiple grassroots data projects in the Houston area to support emerging issues in environmental justice and immigrant justice. Planned local activations will involve a Free Futurist Library to invite community members into imagining data-liberated futures and the launch of a zine imprint to spread awareness about data rights.
To learn more about how to collaborate with The People’s Data Project, contact katya@peoplesdataproject.org
The People's Data Project 
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