Data sovereignty for First Nations housing records

Why housing records need it

A housing department holds some of the most personal information a nation keeps: who lives in each home, household members, income and arrears, maintenance and inspection history, and the story of every allocation. Most software pools every customer’s records into one big shared database and separates them with a filter. Nation Pathways does not.

A database of your own

Every nation gets its own separate database — not a shared one with a filter. Your applications, tenant files and finances are physically isolated from every other community’s. A misconfiguration in someone else’s workspace can’t touch yours, because there is no shared data store to leak from.

Designed around OCAP®

Ownership, Control, Access and Possession guide how the platform is built:

• Ownership — the records are your nation’s, held in your nation’s own database.
• Control — your nation decides who sees what. Role-based permissions reach down to individual actions, configured by your Executive Director and enforced by the system.
• Access — staff, leadership and members reach the system at your nation’s own web address, each with the view that fits them, and a complete export of your data is yours whenever you ask, delivered within 15 business days.
• Possession — your records stay in your possession, including if you ever choose to leave.

Hosted in Canada

Your nation’s data is hosted on Canadian infrastructure and stays in Canada — no offshore replication of your members’ records, and no routing through wherever a vendor’s servers happen to be cheapest.

Never sold. Never mined.

Your data is not sold, shared, or used to train anything. There are no advertising trackers, no analytics scripts phoning home and no third-party cookies — on the product, and on this website. Even the maps use OpenStreetMap instead of Google. The optional AI staff assistant is read-only, respects each user’s permissions, and never trains on your data.

Support access you can see

If we ever sign in to your workspace to help, it’s through a nation-specific secure channel, it’s audited on both sides, and your Executive Director is notified by email the moment it happens. You can also turn that access off entirely.

An audit trail nobody can edit

Every meaningful action is written to an append-only log — entries can’t be quietly changed or deleted, by anyone. When a question comes up about who changed a file or approved an exception, the answer is on the record.

Your records go with you

You control access, and a complete export of your data is yours whenever you ask. If you ever leave, your records go with you. That’s the deal.

OCAP® (Ownership, Control, Access and Possession) is a registered trademark of the First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC). Nation Pathways is designed in alignment with these principles; we are not affiliated with or endorsed by FNIGC.