At OpenArchive, we work to create a more just, equitable, and sustainable media ecosystem where people's histories are protected and preserved.

We do this by:

1. partnering with Decentralized Archivist Communities (DACs) to jointly support decentralization, archiving, and preservation efforts to ensure human rights documentation is safe and accessible in the long term;

2. building responsive tools like our Save app which helps eyewitnesses preserve, protect, authenticate and amplify crucial evidentiary records;

3. developing best practice guides on preserving evidence and combatting disinformation; and

4. conducting co-research with communities around the world.

We work with communities that are documenting and preserving evidentiary media through the DAC Program. We work closely with in-country community managers with deep regional knowledge to glean real-world, on-the-ground insights in order to best learn about and meet communities' needs. We do so by providing needs assessments, security and archival workshops, assistance with internal documentation and workflows, Save implementation and integration with organizations’ backend archives, and providing support for their activities and archives.

Through the collaboration, we gain valuable insights into the needs, frustrations, workflows, limitations, and threats our user communities face. This research allows us to adapt and update our tools and resources. We then publish our research findings to share with the broader community of archival and human rights practitioners and scholars.

Our goal is that, through these collaborations, the communities we work with can grow and strengthen their archiving and documentation processes.

A Look at the First DAC Cohort

OpenArchive collaborates with Decentralized Archivist Communities (DACs) who are defending human rights worldwide. In 2023, we worked with seven DACs from Eastern Europe, MENA, the United States, and Latin America who work to document and safeguard evidence despite escalating challenges.

Ethnography in Practice: The Program Structure

We customize the DAC program framework to match DAC partners’ most pressing needs and meet communities where they are at with their comfortability with technology and their specific threat landscape.

The program generally follows the following three phases of work:

Phase 1: Co-Research

During the first phase, we meet with the DAC manager and other key members of the DAC organization to get a preliminary understanding of who they are, who they work with, and their current workflow for managing and preserving evidentiary media.

We work with the DAC to co-develop a needs assessment survey to capture community members' strengths, goals, tasks, tools, technical skill levels and the environment and threat landscape in which they operate. This information allows us to customize the support and training plans we provide for the subsequent phases of the partnership. Then, the DAC manager works to distribute the needs assessment survey with their network in their country/region.

Phase 2: Research Analysis and Publication

In the second phase, we review and analyze survey responses with the DAC partners. Further needs assessment research is sometimes required, including follow-up surveys and further interviews.

During the research analysis phase, we carefully assess survey respondents’ threats, needs, technical capacities, and current archival workflows through user persona building and other research methods outlined in the human-rights-centered-design (HRCD) methodology. This allows us to gain deeper insight into the structural harms that the DAC and its partner organizations experience and enables us to adapt our tools to better protect them and their media.

User personas are modeled after a particular individual or role but also incorporate fictional aspects that researchers use to create archetypes that describe the behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, background information, and the environment in which the role operates. This HRCD strategy is an intersectional, thorough, and secure approach to developing a robust archetype representing key characteristics relevant to the role.

After we finish collecting research, we analyze the findings, create a research memo and personas and share these with the broader community. We then meet with the DAC to review key recommendations, plan trainings, and discuss other ways we can support them.

Phase 3: Holding Community Workshops & Sharing Feedback

We host two-hour train-the-trainer sessions with key DAC personnel. These sessions are opportunities for us to address ways to mitigate their unique threat models and risks, cover what Save does and doesn’t do, and how the tool can best benefit their community.

During the workshops, we share a live demo of the app, host a Q&A session, and provide technical troubleshooting. After the session, it is our goal that attendees feel equipped to independently host workshops on the app with their larger community.

DAC partners also assist with translations of guides or other materials if needed, and host larger community workshops on how to use Save. During these sessions, they also collect feedback about features and usability blocks the community has so OpenArchive can continue to improve and iterate on the app. After the workshops, we stay in touch for a while in order to answer any questions and provide support when needed.

What the DAC partners had to say

What the DAC partners had to say

We grouped the DAC's key challenges and threats into four buckets: physical security, digital security, access to information, and technical/resource restraints.

Some areas, like Ukraine, were primarily concerned with technical and resource restraints. In contrast, other places like Cuba and Ecuador were more focused on the physical dangers they experienced in the course of their work.

Commonly-identified threats: device confiscation/loss of media; privacy and digital security; physical security for themselves, work contacts or loved ones, imprisonment, and accessing public information.

Our top recommendations: integrating workflow tools like Save to help manage and preserve their evidence, using VPNs and Signal to secure their communications, investing in resources that boost internet connectivity, and providing technical training that focuses on digital security.

What’s Next for OpenArchive and the DAC Program

Through several phases of co-research, we have learned quite a bit about the unique contexts our DACs work in and gained a better understanding of their needs.

Using findings from our co-research, we will continue to customize workshops and trainings and implement usability enhancements to our Save app. Over the next couple of years, we will be further enabling people to use secure decentralized storage, also be adding several security features and providing an end-to-end encryption option to Save to better protect our users and their media as they work to document, preserve, and share evidence.

In the next few months, we will be publishing a research paper on the benefits and drawbacks of using novel technologies like decentralized web storage that show promise to solve for a few key archiving challenges like verification, redundancy, security, and long-term acess. This paper builds on our previous two posts on Mapping the Decentralized Web Ecosystem and Harm Reduction for History’s First Responders, which provide a foundation for our ongoing research of this novel archival tech and situate it within the broader community.

Contact Us

Contact us at info[at]open-archive.org to learn more about us and Save training opportunities.