Guide
Data ownership 101 for institutions
Your records are your institution’s memory. Five principles to keep them yours, whatever software you use.
Institutions outlive software. The membership registry your community keeps today may pass through four systems in twenty years — but the records themselves must survive every migration intact. That only happens if ownership is treated as a design principle, not a clause in the fine print.
The five principles
Ownership in writing. Your agreement should say plainly: the data is yours. Not “you retain rights to” — yours.
Export without permission. If getting your own records out requires a support ticket, you don’t control them. Test the export before you sign, not after you’re unhappy.
Open formats. CSV, JSON, standard documents — formats any future system can read. Proprietary exports are a lock dressed as a door.
Isolation. Ask whether your records sit in their own environment or in shared tables with a customer_id column. Isolation limits the blast radius of everyone else’s mistakes.
A named exit. The relationship should describe its own ending: what you receive, in what format, in what timeframe, at what cost (ideally: everything, open, promptly, none).
None of these require technical expertise to demand — only the willingness to ask and the patience to hear real answers. Your successors will inherit whatever discipline you apply today.
Sound like your institution?
A discovery conversation applies this thinking to your actual workflows — no pitch, just the map.