Collaboration and community engagement are essential components of effective organizational strategies.

From recent developments in Myanmar, to social advocacy movements in North America and Europe, widespread digital literacy and internet access empower communities to document and share important events.

We know that anyone with a smartphone can document critical events, but the irreplaceable moments we capture on our phones are fragile and ephemeral. Oftentimes, the only other versions of this essential media reside on social media platforms that — while extremely effective in amplifying causes and primary accounts — can limit expression through content removal, restrictions, and privacy breaches. Social media also does not provide sufficient privacy protections or archival preservation of this irreplaceable media.

That’s why privacy-conscious archivists like ourselves are embracing more decentralized organizational models and technologies to ensure redundancy and accessibility.

This second part of our three-part “Archiving Forward” series will talk about our decentralized ecosystem, and how community organizations, tech developers, and everyday users each play a critical role in preserving, amplifying, and securely routing significant records of important social events and privacy-sensitive information.

The tech industry's exploitation of its users' content, data, and privacy signals the need for an accessible public trust, outside the corporate walled gardens currently dominating the online media ecosystem. Archiving Forward refers to a bottom-up framework that brings autonomy back to the content creator.

From the decentralized archivists who collect important documentation, to the collaborators and volunteers who build and contribute to our tools, to the stewards who amplify our work, we all have a hand in preserving essential information.

Decentralized Archivists

We aren’t interested in creating a centralized archive at OpenArchive. Instead, we are cultivating decentralized, redundant, secure, robust, verifiable, and accessible archives that center the communities we work with.

We use a community-centered co-research and design process to work with communities worldwide, which we refer to as Decentralized Archivist Communities (DACs). These DACs are made up of privacy-conscious documentarians, legal observers, historians, and everyday eyewitnesses who capture and store critical documentation of significant social events and privacy-sensitive issues. This documentation is often stored on the most fragile devices they own – their phones.

There are countless tools and resources for the creation and capture of digital media. We are in a moment where we need to demystify the preservation of this content. That’s why we are training communities in Ukraine, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Latin America, and the U.S. on how to use our tools and safeguard their mobile media.

For example, in Ukraine, we already have folks on the ground documenting significant events and creating robust, verifiable, and accessible archives. We are partnering with a Ukrainian DAC to facilitate trainings on best practices for archiving and digital security in active zones of conflict. In Philadelphia, PA, and Portland, OR, we are helping communities preserve documentation of social issues, particularly concerning privacy-sensitive activities.

OpenArchive and these DACs are implementing a robust, redundant, and interoperable archiving workflow. We are working with a number of communities that are already using our tools to create their own archives. Our goal is to engage more deeply with them by conducting collaborative research, educational outreach, and digital security trainings.

Our Partners

The role that individuals, small community organizations, and international partners play to create impactful archives cannot be overstated. We have seen communities successfully collaborate to document and preserve critical information for justice and accountability, highlighting the importance of secure and verifiable archives.

Efforts to collect, archive, and verify crucial documentation are often the result of close collaboration between individuals and organizations committed to maintaining an equitable and sustainable media ecosystem, where important community histories are preserved and accessible.

Our collaboration with Guardian Project enabled us to launch our Save (Share, Archive, Verify, Encrypt) app. The partnership provided us with the technologists and usability expertise we needed to make Save an easy-to-use, secure archiving tool that empowers users to circumvent threats to privacy such as device confiscation, network blocking, doxxing, surveillance, and more.

Secure, interoperable, and privacy-minded tools are often inaccessible and unusable for small community organizations and everyday users. That’s where larger, well-resourced organizations or “stewards” come into play. Through our decentralized partnerships, we leverage our expertise and resources to demystify and adapt our tools to be responsive to the communities they serve. Because Save is open source, others can adapt the app to fit their needs.

Over the past decade, we’ve conducted co-research with diverse communities worldwide to identify critical features for our Save app. This research ensures the app is tailored to communities who need it most. We intentionally developed Save as an open-source application, allowing anyone to modify its features to better meet their requirements.

Recognizing the need for Save within larger organizations, we partnered with international NGOs to understand community needs, create user personas, and adapt the app accordingly. Save provides fully encrypted and self-hosted file transfer mapped to archives for international teams. Our partners act as stewards by using our tools, amplifying our guides and research with their communities, and supporting ongoing development efforts.

Archival institutions like the Internet Archive provide free access to decades of digitized historical records. Our Save app utilizes the Internet Archive as an optional public back-end while also connecting to private, secure, open-source servers, giving users more control over access to their media collections.

OpenArchive unites the work of Creative Commons, Tor, and distributed secure servers like Nextcloud, offering privacy-focused groups greater control over their historical records by providing secure transit, media authentication, pseudonymity, licensing controls, and the ability to choose where and how their media is stored.

Volunteers and In-Kind Support

Volunteers and organizations that provide in-kind support are invaluable to the OpenArchive ecosystem. Global programs and educational institutions like Internews’ BASICS program, Outreachy, and the UC Berkeley School of Information provide us paid contractors specializing in programming, research, user experience, documentation, graphic design, data science, marketing, and user advocacy.

Localization Lab plays a critical role in translating and localizing our research, guides, and technology, making them more accessible globally.

Our volunteer-run advisory board is instrumental in supporting our organization’s fundraising, communications, and programmatic strategy.