Cohesion Lab
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Commitments.

What we hold ourselves to on every engagement. Written so you can hold us to them too.

Our commitments

  1. We will never sell or share your collection data.

    Your records belong to you. We are a service firm, not a data broker. If a future buyer or investor proposes otherwise, that deal ends our relationship with you first.

  2. We will never take on Indigenous materials without Indigenous partnership.

    We work with Free, Prior, and Informed Consent as a community-controlled, ongoing process — not a one-time checkbox — and we defer to the community's own data-sovereignty framework via credentialed partners[2]. We do not yet have an established Indigenous partnership, so today we decline Indigenous-collection work rather than attempt it unpartnered. When a project involves Indigenous collections and cannot be designed in genuine partnership with the relevant community on their terms, we decline.

  3. We will never lock your data to our platform.

    When an engagement ends, you take your records with you — in formats your next vendor, your systems team, or a future scholar can open and read.

  4. We will decline work we can't do well.

    If your collection, your timeline, or your budget don't match what we can deliver, we'll tell you — and we'll help you find someone better suited. Fit is a form of respect.

  5. If we make a mistake, we will say so publicly.

    This work is high-stakes. When we get something wrong, we correct it and we record it — publicly when a published record is affected, and directly with anyone whose trust is involved.

  6. We will name our standards honestly.

    We use two well-known sets of principles — one for the technical work[1], one for the practice[3] — and we'll tell you exactly which ones. We don't borrow Indigenous frameworks for non-Indigenous work[4]; the same values exist in other traditions, and that's where we draw from.

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Sources

The plain-language notes above point here. Each entry names the technical term, a one-line meaning, and the original source.

  1. FAIR. A checklist for keeping records easy to find, open, share, and reuse over time. Stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. Used by museums, libraries, and research data centers worldwide. Wilkinson, M.D. et al. (2016). Scientific Data 3:160018. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18
  2. Indigenous data sovereignty frameworks. These are community-led frameworks we defer to via credentialed partners, each specific to its own peoples and jurisdiction: the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (the global framework meant to sit alongside FAIR); OCAP® — First Nations Ownership, Control, Access and Possession, a registered trademark of the First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC), specific to First Nations in Canada and requiring FNIGC's Fundamentals of OCAP® training to apply; Te Mana Raraunga (Māori Data Sovereignty Network, Aotearoa New Zealand); Maiam nayri Wingara (Australia); and Sámi SODA (Sápmi). We do not operate these frameworks ourselves; where one applies, we defer to it and work through credentialed partners. https://www.gida-global.org/care
  3. Stewardship principles. Four named commitments — Authority, Custody, Provenance, Capacity — drawn from museum ethics (ICOM), archival practice (ICA, SAA), and library practice (ALA). https://icom.museum/en/resources/standards-guidelines/code-of-ethics/
  4. TK and BC Labels (Local Contexts). Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels and Biocultural (BC) Labels are small markers added by Indigenous and local communities that say who an item belongs to and how it should be used. They are designed and applied by the community, not by us. https://localcontexts.org/labels/traditional-knowledge-labels/