Six Lessons on Community Data from Global Movements
Reclaiming Data as a Tool for Equity, Power-Sharing, and Collective Flourishing
By Em Piro
Data often feels like the domain of outsiders — technocrats, planners, or out-of-touch institutions. But from Kenya to Brazil to India, communities around the world are reclaiming data not as extractive surveillance, but as a living, breathing language of collaboration. For facilitators working at the intersection of equity, data, and collective action, there’s much to learn from the software and platforms used in global movements.
This spring, I had the opportunity to attend Political Software: Mapping Digital Worlds from Below, where technologists from around the world shared lessons, practices, and challenges in community data. Here are six lessons from political software from around the world that can transform how we work with community data.
Across all these examples, one principle holds true: data should be in companionship with community. Not extracted from it. Not imposed on it. Facilitators working on the frontlines of equity can use data not as a tool of control, but as a site of collaboration, bridge-building, and shared power.
1. Data as a Bridge between Community and Government
In times of crisis or division, platforms like Ushahidi in Kenya, have transformed community input into living maps of community response, need, and directive action. The Ushahidi name comes from the Swahili word for “testimony,” chosen to reflect how the platform gave voice to the people of Kenya during a time of social and political unrest. Originally developed to track post-election violence in Kenya, Ushahidi now supports disaster response, mutual aid, and human rights monitoring around the world.
When governments engage communities in good faith, residents can become essential collaborators, guiding agencies to where resources are most urgently needed. In Kenya, when the government was proactive and responsive to community reports of obstructions at polling places, voter turnout increased significantly.
The lesson: When needs are easily documented and meaningfully addressed, data becomes a shared resource for both communities and governments to work together, building the trust and collaboration that is essential to good governance.
2. Making Displaced Communities Visible in India
In Delhi, the Missing Basti project makes displaced communities visible to planners who have historically left them off official maps.
Missing Basti strategically employs public engagement and education, using tools that range from graphic novels to toolkits and games to demystify displacement and decode technocratic planning language like “master plan.” (Who is a master? What is a plan?)
With an impacted community that largely doesn’t read at all, Missing Basti is committed to returning the invisible and most impacted into the planning process. By incorporating familiar media like textiles, it made mapping tangible for people who had never before seen a map. Facilitators played a critical role in translating between communities and planners — resulting in over 30,000 public comments during one open comment period, a tenfold increase from past processes.
The lesson: Data needs interpretation, not just visualization. The ability to read the map is essential to having a fair and accurate place on the map.
3. Process Matters: Some mapping projects aren’t about the final map — they’re about the mapping itself.
In Brazil, Orangotango uses pop-ups, gamification, mapping parties, and workshops not just to chart space but to bring people together across differences. Labor and climate organizers, for example, often work in separate lanes. But by centering the mapping process around shared stakes — like land, water, or housing — they find alignment.
These projects tap into participatory processes that surface tension, generate dialogue, and spark imagination. When groups decide together what to map and what not to, they’re practicing power — not just analyzing it.
The lesson: The process of co-creation can be just as transformative, at times, even more, than the final output.
4. Using Maps to Reveal Power
LittleSis is the defiant counterpoint to Big Brother — it’s grassroots power research, mapping the relationships between elites, institutions, and systems that usually operate behind closed doors.
These maps help communities identify pressure points, allies, or accountability targets.
The lesson: Data doesn’t just show things — it reveals connections. Whether building bridges or creating leverage, relationships are often the most strategic form of data we have.
5. The Software Changes, but the Technology Is Ancient
What is technology fundementally for? In autonomous villages of Quilombo Afro-Indigenous communities in Brazil, Rota dos Baobás & Casa Tainã has developed their own software and communication infrastructure that assembles and distributes information grounded in community needs, not corporate infrastructures. The essential reason for this software is relationships, memory, and collective care: “Nothing for me, everything for us.” Data is continually reflected through a framework of ancestral truths: What does it mean to live a flourishing, abundant life? Do our tools support this, or move us further from it?
Their free, community-based data centers aren’t called “servers”—a term too tied to colonial and enslaving frameworks. They are instead “seeds,” representing their function of regeneration, growth, and rootedness. These technologies aim to hold memory, to nourish identity, and to recognize communication as a source of power.
The lesson: Data is never neutral. It is always embedded in systems of power, the body, land, and ancient technologies. When we honor this, we move closer to data practices that nourish collective life—not extract from it.
Disclaimer: This project is led by Afro-Indigenous Peoples in Brazil. This reflection should be read as a snapshot of my memories and impressions of what they shared, and not as an authoritative interpretation of their knowledge and approach.
6. Safety Enables Participation
Started in Montreal, Queering the Map is a crowdsourced map of queer memory and experience. Its power lies in what it doesn’t collect — no metadata, no personal information. This makes it safe to contribute from anywhere in the world - including in places where submitting a dataset can mean risking your safety (for example, as a Queer person in a place where it is illegal or dangerous to be so).
The result is a communal dataset where people in isolated or hostile environments can locate themselves within a broader collective. It offers a subtle but powerful affirmation: you are not alone — someone like you, if also protected by their invisibility, is right beside you, one block over. It allows a space for candid testimony, witnessing, and survival. By removing surveillance, this platform invites participation that is otherwise inaccessible at best, life threatening at worst.
The lesson: Equity in data collection means creating conditions of trust and safety first.
