We will never ask you for your data: Māori GIS, control and the difference between access and authority
One sentence eventually became one of the clearest principles in Ngā Poutama Matawhenua: we will never ask you for your data. It sounds like a small operational rule for a training programme. In reality it contains much of what twenty years of Māori GIS work taught me about authority, trust, rangatiratanga and the limits of technical access.
GIS people are trained to acquire data. We search for layers, download services, request files, convert formats and build databases. The professional instinct is often that more information is better. In many ordinary projects that instinct is useful. In Māori GIS it can become dangerous if the technical desire to collect information gets ahead of the questions that should come first: whose information is this, what relationships does it sit within, who has authority over it, why is it being collected and what responsibilities come with holding it?
I am not Māori and do not claim to define tikanga for other people's information. What I can describe is the change in my own practice after years of working with claimant information, iwi and hapū projects, Māori GIS practitioners and training programmes. The more I learnt, the less comfortable I became with the ordinary technology assumption that the person who possesses the file is therefore entitled to organise, copy, analyse and publish it. Technical custody and legitimate authority are not the same thing.
That distinction sits close to rangatiratanga. In a GIS context, I have come to think about it practically: who can decide what is collected, who can see it, where it lives, what leaves the organisation and whether a map should be made public at all? A platform can give people access while quietly shifting those decisions elsewhere. A community can be invited into a modern digital system while losing control over where the information goes. The interface may look empowering while the architecture does the opposite.