The archive includes public PECE essays (largely organized by thematic topic, e.g. Open Access in Africa; COVID-19 in Kenya, experiences of researching in/from Nairobi; experiences being researched in Kibera), private PECE essays (largely organized by research organization as a kind of org archive); photo essays (e.g. for visualizing the virus), timelines (of my research updates; tech development in Kenya). I am also working on what it looks like to publish my dissertation via the site (see ongoing draft here; specific chapter example here).
Especially when I was in Nairobi, perhaps as a result of the worries of my interlocutors regarding government surveillance, I felt growing wariness about publishing openly. I became increasingly concerned about anonymity and err’ed on the side of caution.
All members of the group have the permissions needed to upload artifacts but this often seems overly laborious, especially since many of the artifacts are first shared on a WhatsApp channel before moving to RDS. Here, we have found PECE’s design has been both catalyzing and constraining. Since PECE does not allow bulk uploads, each artifact added must be justified with commentary. This means that every artifact has an interpretive supplement from the start but this can be challenging in a fast-paced research environment like Nairobi, where “time is money.”
Much of my personal research materials are open and available to be re-used under CC licenses. There are a few completely private spaces (where I am the only person that has access to something). There are a few restricted spaces such as individual research organization’s org archives which are only viewable to those in the organization's group. We have an RDS group, which includes the Design Group members as well as several other researchers. In all cases, users need to register and either request access or be invited to the group.
On November 12, 2019, I and a team of volunteers and friends hosted an event entitled “Archiving Kenya’s Past and Futures” at McMillan Library, one of the oldest Kenyan libraries located in Nairobi’s Central Business District. (Find event proceedings here.) The event brought together fifty researchers, archival specialists, open data technologists, and government representatives to think about the intersection between open data technologies, digital humanities and research data practices in Kenya. The aim of bringing such a diverse group together was, as Yates-Doerr (2019) has described, to foster a space of exchange and learning where collaborators come from places of difference and practice “careful equivocation” (Yates‐Doerr 2019) to unsettle the binaries often drawn between one object, category or term and another. This event was designed to create interest in both RDS and a gamut of questions about the kind of knowledge infrastructure needed in Kenya at this stage. It resulted in the formation of the Research Data KE Working Group, which has sustained the dialogue using the RDS site as virtual workspace. The Research Data Share KE Working Group is now looking to develop a digital event series to commence later this year entitled “Nairobi Research Buzz” as a way to continue facilitating development of connections across difference and emergent discursive communities in Kenya.
www.researchdatashare.org is hosted on Linode servers located in Frankfurt, Germany since at the time of installation, those were the closest Linode servers to Kenya and provided the greatest latency (fastest speed). Linode is a private American company based in Philadelphia. I deeply contemplated whether or not to host with a Kenya-based company, and in fact did so for the first several months but the costs was too high to pay in the long term from my own pocket (~$50 USD a month) and the site does not have enough content and activity to justify keeping a tech team on retainer. Our group also uses Zotero, Google Docs, Email, and Whatsapp. We used Typeform to circulate a digital survey in 2020 with researchers in Kenya.
The server on which RDS sits costs $12.50 USD a month to maintain and run back-ups. I (Angela Okune) pay for this out of my personal funds. I also pay for the domain name on an annual basis ($15 USD). The initial technical set-up was done pro bono by Dr. Brian Callahan who also support any technical issues that might arise. Renato Vasconcellos Gomes is the key person supporting the RDS technical maintainance and troubleshooting of RDS and does this work for RDS pro bono/covered by other PECE platforms. Leah Horgan designed and created the RDS logo pro bono. Lindsay Poirier and other members of the PECE design team support ongoing feature requests. Librarians and archivists at the University of California, Irvine and University of California, Berkeley have provided guidance on technical documentation for RDS. The archive content is uploaded on a volunteer basis by RDS working group members. There was a small grant provided by UCSB Blum Center to support some of the work towards the public event in November 2019.