The OpenArchive team is proud to announce the launch of Save, our new mobile application that integrates privacy-enhancing technologies with digital media preservation to make media findable, verifiable, and archived for long-term access.

Save enables individuals and organizations to streamline their management process for managing mobile media documentation, enhance their digital content collaboration, and make it easier to securely archive community and sensitive media. From social networks to video hosting platforms, many of the go-to media hosting platforms are monetized by invasive adtech, driven by surveillance features, and subjected to arbitrary content takedowns. We created Save to authenticate and safeguard media for long-term preservation and protect the identity of those sharing their documentation. While researching and creating the tool with the communities it serves, we paid special attention to threats that we increasingly encounter when posting citizen journalism online, such as internet shutdowns, targeting journalists online, device confiscations, censorship, limited bandwidth, and data loss.

While embarking on OpenArchive’s journey to launch our new flagship tool Save, we were deliberately careful to incorporate feedback from our extensive ethnographic research and incorporate emergent digital archiving practices. With a mission to provide an alternative hosting framework to commercially available products, Save puts control of the lifecycle of mobile media back in the hands of those who created the media: citizen journalists, human rights defenders, and others risking their freedom to share their stories. With native functionalities that include adding nuanced metadata for verification and Creative Commons licensing, Save was built to streamline a user experience that is intuitive for both individuals and organizations.

We couldn’t be where we are today without a wonderful community of supporters, many of whom have volunteered their time to help us design Save with our end-users’ safety, security and diverse circumstances in mind. We are also grateful to generous support from the Open Technology Fund and Knight Foundation who have helped OpenArchive continue to develop tools, integrate best practices, and improve usability over the past years.

In the coming year, the OpenArchive team will continue to engage with our community, offer trainings, improve documentation, share our expertise, and advocate for open archiving frameworks that allow people to store and manage their content outside the walled gardens of proprietary Silicon Valley companies.

Last month, OpenArchive’s founder Natalie joined panels and hosted a workshop to share Save with the Human Rights community at RightsCon in Tunis. We want to take every opportunity we have to engage with the communities we serve so we can continually improve the functionality and usability they require and ensure that people can manage their digital media outside of the surveillance capitalism-driven media management systems currently on the market. If you know of great places we should be, let us know!

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