Programs
The Decentralized Archivist Community Program
The DAC program builds partnerships between OpenArchive and organizations or collectives creating and managing mobile media archives. Through the collaboration, we gain valuable insights on the needs, frustrations, workflows, limitations, and threats our user communities face. This research allows us to adapt and update the Save app as well as customize workshops, trainings, and guides. We publish our research findings to share with the wider community of archival and human rights practitioners and scholars.
Most importantly, the communities we work with are able to grow or strengthen their archiving and documentation processes. Through the DAC program, partners will benefit from:
- Archiving workflow support and guidance;
- Training and workshops on mobile media archiving through the Save app;
- Needs assessments to uncover threats and pain points;
- Amplification of their work;
- Digital security trainings;
- Funding to support archival and documentation work.
The program framework is customized to match DAC partners’ most pressing needs and meet communities at their comfort zones.
Decentralized Archivist Communities
We partner with “Decentralized Archivist Communities” (DACs) to jointly support, steward, and promote decentralization, archiving, and preservation efforts to ensure their documentation is safe and accessible for the long-term. We have a rapidly growing number of communities that are already using our tools to create their own archives who engage deeply with us through collaborative educational outreach and trainings.
Since 2022, our DAC program is one of the key ways we interact with communities that are documenting and preserving evidentiary media. Through our partnerships, we provide needs assessments, security and archival workshops, assistance with internal documentation and workflows, Save implementation and integration with organizations’ backend archives, as well as funding to support their activities and archives.
Where Our DACs Work
OpenArchive currently focuses on the following regions and has six active partnerships with organizations in Iraq, Ukraine, the US, Sudan, Ecuador, Cuba, and Mexico.
Become a DAC Partner
We strive to dismantle silos and work alongside communities who share our goals toward achieving a more equitable and representative media landscape. We currently partner with DACs who are creating robust, decentralized evidentiary archives from mobile media.
We provide funding to DACs who seek to create a secure, decentralized, and accessible archive to preserve their documentation.
Contact Us to learn more about becoming a DAC partner!
Our Users
Our work is a result of more than a decade of applied research and collaboration with at-risk communities and human rights defense organizations around the world. Through these collaborations, we are employing co-research and co-design to better understand our users’ needs and how our programs and technology can best support their efforts to preserve truth to power.
To learn more about our users, explore use cases built from our community partnerships in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the United States, and the MENA region.
