# Community Data Sovereignty **Domain:** Data Governance / Collective Rights / Infrastructure **Doc Type:** Canonical Governance Principle **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Community data sovereignty** is the authority of a community to participate in defining how data about its people, land, health, labor, culture and ecological stewardship is collected, interpreted, shared, commercialized and used in decisions. It extends beyond individual consent because many consequential datasets describe neighborhoods, tribes, watersheds, populations or social relationships that cannot be reduced to isolated personal records. ## Climate Context Climate models may use local observations, public infrastructure and long-duration ecological knowledge to produce commercial or administrative value. [[wiki/Programmable Reciprocity|Programmable Reciprocity]] requires benefit and obligation to travel with that value. [[wiki/Fiduciary Governance|Fiduciary Governance]] imposes duties on institutions that hold the resulting informational advantage. [[articles/Climate Justice and Global Reparative Systems|Climate Justice and Global Reparative Systems]] emphasizes that Indigenous and local communities should act as data partners, fiduciaries and model authors rather than merely as measured populations. ## Constitutional Requirements Community sovereignty includes collective notice, consent where appropriate, purpose limitation, negotiated benefit-sharing, provenance, access to model assumptions, [[wiki/Model Contestability|Model Contestability]] and authority to challenge harmful reuse. It does not authorize community leadership to erase the rights of individual members. Collective and individual rights must constrain one another reciprocally. ## Key Insight **A community should not become informational raw material for systems that govern it while remaining unable to inspect, contest or benefit from those systems.** ## See Also [[wiki/Indigenous Knowledge Systems|Indigenous Knowledge Systems]], [[wiki/Public Data Infrastructure|Public Data Infrastructure]], [[wiki/Provenance|Provenance]], [[wiki/Score Separability|Score Separability]], [[wiki/Rights|Rights]]