Proposal Description

In the current data ecosystem, unspecialized users frequently find difficulties in connecting with quality or official statistics – a structural challenge effectively illustrated by the United Nations’ "data onion" model (United Nations, 2025). Citizens rarely pierce the outer commercial layers of this ecosystem, creating a dual divide of technical accessibility and institutional recognition. Often, marginalized communities do not feel recognized within official frameworks or survey results; because traditional statistics rely on top-down categories, frequently flatten complex realities, leaving spatial inequalities, localized identities, vulnerabilities, and community dynamics statistically invisible.
To bridge this divide, the Copenhagen Framework on Citizen Data establishes that official statistical production gains true public value and democratic legitimacy only when citizens are considered across the entire data value chain. Leveraging social contributions at different stages—from conceptual design to processing and dissemination—revests the production of official statistics with meaning. Because community realities are dynamic, historical, and multidimensional, social approaches must be carefully integrated into the data value chain; failing to do so risks leaving legitimate interest in statistical oblivion.
This Invited Paper Session explores five strategic topics designed to move citizens from passive subjects of enumeration or distant target users to active data agents:
First, addressing the conceptual design stage, the session explores direct engagement and continuous dialogue with citizens in defining informal settlements as “Favelas and Urban Communities” and in defining methodologies to account for those conceptual changes. This approach helps ensure that official classifications avoid stigmatization and better reflect the aspirations, identities and perspectives of the communities themselves, rather than relying on top-down assumptions.
Second, the session discusses the participation of traditional peoples and communities (or tribal and indigenous peoples as denominated by OIT) in survey design, focusing on co-designed national instruments that guarantee the accurate, dignified, and representative inclusion of Indigenous and Quilombola populations.
Third, the focus shifts to the output phase of the chain, examining how considering targeted users in the design process allow citizens to directly shape dissemination products, ensuring official data is accessible and applicable to user needs.
Fourth, the session addresses data capacity-building by analysing how specialized workshops can enable civil society organizations to access, interpret and apply statistical and geospatial data on Favelas and Urban Communities. This process contributes to transforming official data into civic empowerment, strengthening local community capacity to claim for improvements, participate in the public debate and perceive public institutions as accountable.
Finally, the session brings a problem-based statistical literacy model developed through an academic extension project, "Learning and Relearning with Citizen Data from Real Problems." By grounding statistical literacy in the immediate, real-world challenges faced by local organizations, this interdisciplinary approach (combining statistics, communication, and social sciences) builds capacities for data use and independent production, while expanding the social consciousness of future statistical professionals.
Together, these presentations demonstrate how national statistical systems can foster data democracy, restore institutional trust, and ensure that no one is left behind.