PowWow

The starting point

OCAP® — Ownership, Control, Access and Possession — are the First Nations principles asserting that a Nation, collectively, governs information about itself. They were created by First Nations and are stewarded by the First Nations Information Governance Centre. They exist because of a long history of information being taken from communities and used in ways they never agreed to.

OCAP® is a registered trademark of the First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC).

What we do not claim

We do not describe this platform as OCAP® compliant or OCAP® certified. No such status exists — FNIGC offers training for individuals, not certification for organisations — and self-declared compliance is the first thing FNIGC names when describing how the term gets misused.

We also do not claim that following privacy law covers it. Privacy law protects individuals. OCAP® protects the Nation collectively, and a dataset with every name removed can satisfy privacy law and still be a serious breach of a community's rights if the community itself remains identifiable.

What we can do is describe what the software actually lets a community do, and be checked on it.

Your Nation owns its data

Everything a community puts here belongs to that community, together with everything derived from it — scores, standings, tabulations and analysis, not only what was typed into a form. This is stated in the written agreement with each community, not only on this page.

We hold it as a contracted steward

Possession is the OCAP® principle we cannot satisfy today, and it is better said than skirted. The data sits on infrastructure we operate, not on infrastructure the Nation controls, and that infrastructure is provided by a United States company with no Canadian region available for the database.

FNIGC's own guidance recognises that a contracted steward is sometimes necessary where a community does not wish to run the infrastructure itself — and that where one is used, there should be a stated path toward the Nation holding its own data. We treat that as the standard we are held to: a written agreement, a reason, and an exit.

What we never do

• We do not use community data for any purpose other than running that community's events.
• We do not combine data across communities, publish comparisons between them, or produce benchmarks.
• We do not sell, rent or disclose it to anyone the community has not agreed to.
• We do not use it to train any artificial intelligence system.
• We do not transfer it if our business changes hands.
• We do not treat removing names as making data anonymous. In a small community, a category, an age and a placing identify a person even with no name attached.

Who consents

A community's leadership decides whether its information is held here, and that decision is made through the Nation's own government — not by an individual staff member and not by a participant signing up. Individual consent is collected separately at registration and does not substitute for it, in either direction: a Nation's agreement does not override a participant's refusal.

What we are still building

Two capabilities are committed and not yet finished, and this page will say so until they are:

• A single complete export of everything belonging to one community, in open formats, including derived data. Today there are twenty-one separate report exports covering operational data; the one-step complete export is in progress.
• Certified deletion on request, with written confirmation, covering file storage and backups.

Other frameworks

OCAP® is a First Nations framework and does not apply to Métis or Inuit organisations, who have their own — including OCAS and the National Inuit Strategy on Research. A community using this platform sets which framework applies to it, and its wording, rather than inheriting ours.

Asking us about this

A community can ask at any time for a record of who has accessed its data, a copy of everything held, or deletion. Contact Great Lakes IT Inc. at greatlakesit.ca.