data_labe

data_labe is a data-journalism and civic-technology laboratory based in the Complexo da Maré — the network of sixteen favelas in the northern zone of Rio de Janeiro housing more than 140,000 residents — that produces community-authored narratives about favela territories from data that official state systems omit or misrepresent. Born in 2016 within the Observatório de Favelas and formally constituted as an autonomous non-profit association in 2018, data_labe is the corpus's first Brazilian local-group entry, closing a Latin America coverage gap on the data-justice and civic-technology strand. Its stated mission — to "promote the democratisation of knowledge through data generation, analysis and dissemination, focusing on race, gender and territory" — frames the production of data by and about favelas as a political act: what co-founder Gilberto Vieira describes as work necessary because "the official data does not take into account the nuances of the periphery, which only we know".

Origin and structure

data_labe emerged from the Observatório de Favelas — a Maré-based civil-society research institution — in partnership with the Escola de Dados Brasil (Data School), which provided the data-journalism training and mentorship scaffolding for the first cohort. The lab was co-founded by Gilberto Vieira and Clara Sacco, both from popular-territory backgrounds; by late 2017 it was operating autonomously, before formally incorporating as an independent association in 2018. The team comprises young residents from Maré and other popular territories working across journalism, design, education, and research. data_labe has been a member of the Global Innovation Gathering since 2017.

The initial five-fellow cohort (2016) was supported by Open Society Foundations and worked with Escola de Dados Brasil and Coding Rights to produce data-visualisation projects on topics including transgender killings, neighbourhood perception, education access, maternal health, and public-transportation privacy. Ford Foundation joined as a funder from September 2017; Open Society Foundations went on to commit three further grants totalling $672,000 between 2019 and 2023, including a $350,000 three-year general-support grant in 2023.

Three operational axes

data_labe operates along three axes: journalism and content production; training and education; and citizen-generated data monitoring.

The journalism axis produces the Data_stories platform — data-driven reporting on health, violence, education, culture, and environment from a favela-resident perspective — and the Data_lábia podcast series on data literacy. Its most structurally significant infrastructure output is the Mapa da Comunicação Comunitária (Community Communication Map), a collaborative platform mapping community media outlets across the Rio metropolitan region.

The education axis runs data-literacy workshops, journalism-training cohorts, and curricula through schools and community organisations in Maré. Later programme expansions have included Códigos Ancestrais — workshops introducing Black women to data science and coding — as an explicit gender and racial-justice strand of the education programme.

The citizen-generated data (GCD) axis is data_labe's most methodologically distinctive contribution: deploying favela residents themselves as primary data producers rather than treating them as subjects of external data systems. Vieira frames this as "how people can produce data by themselves and be engaged in the production of data without being a formal research institute". In September 2023, data_labe hosted the 1º Seminário de Geração Cidadã de Dados (First Citizen Data Generation Seminar), drawing researchers from Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Pará — a signal of the GCD methodology's take-up beyond Maré.

Key programmes

CocôZap is data_labe's most-cited civic-technology programme — a WhatsApp-based channel through which Maré residents submit sanitation complaints (sewage leaks, floods, garbage failures) with photographs and geolocation data, which data_labe aggregates into mapped public reports used in direct engagement with utilities and public authorities. Created in 2016 and formally launched in 2017 after winning the DataShift Community Seed Funding Challenge run by CIVICUS's DataShift initiative, CocôZap is co-operated with Redes da Maré and Casa Fluminense with academic partnerships at PUCPR and UFRJ's engineering department. 65+ residents contributed data across Nova Holanda, Rubens Vaz, and Parque União favelas; local youth were hired as mobilisers, embedding the citizen-data methodology in the community's own workforce rather than treating participation as a one-time volunteer act. Co-funding came from the Heinrich Böll Foundation and Fundo Socioambiental Caixa.

Crimideia is a campaign data_labe runs against the criminalisation of funk music and culture in Brazil. Funk carioca — born in Rio's favelas and disproportionately associated with Black and peripheral Brazilian communities — has faced sustained policing and legal suppression, including show shutdowns and municipal bans; Crimideia deploys data and narrative to document and contest those suppressions, directly connecting data_labe's data-justice methodology to Maré's cultural identity and to racial justice in a register that the sanitation-complaint CocôZap does not reach.

Criptofunk is an annual festival connecting technology and funk that serves as data_labe's cultural-bridge programme, placing digital-rights education inside a favela-cultural context and generating participation from community members who might not engage with conventional tech-literacy formats. It has served as the venue for data_labe's collaboration with Tactical Tech to adapt and localise digital-rights materials for Maré audiences.

Place in movement

data_labe is the corpus's entry point into the Brazilian favela-based data-justice strand — a form of grassroots AI- and data-accountability work the corpus has not previously captured. It operates at the intersection of three movement-area threads the corpus holds separately for other geographies: the community-infrastructure strand (Detroit Community Technology Project builds neighbourhood wireless; data_labe builds citizen-data infrastructure); the surveillance and algorithmic-accountability strand (Stop LAPD Spying Coalition produces police-technology data for Los Angeles; data_labe produces police-violence and sanitation data for Maré); and the cultural-artifact and popular-expression thread, which Crimideia and Criptofunk address from a favela standpoint.

What makes data_labe structurally distinctive within the corpus is its simultaneous commitment to methodology: it does not only analyse data produced by state or corporate systems but trains communities to produce the data that describes their own lives — the citizen-generated data axis as political act. Open Society Foundations, which committed $672,000 in documented grants between 2019 and 2023, and Ford Foundation, which joined as a funder from September 2017, together indicate durable institutional support across data_labe's post-independence phase — unusual resilience for a favela-based organisation in Brazil's constrained NGO funding environment. The 2023 Citizen Data Generation Seminar convening researchers from three Brazilian states suggests data_labe's transition from a Maré-based experimental project to a national node in community-data practice.