Historypin Research Institutional Partners
We’re inviting a select number of Institutional/Storage Partners who are committed to supporting community-based archives to join this research to consider what role they can play in a decentralized storage network for public benefit. Institutional Partner Representatives will participate alongside our Historypin Research Faculty and Technical Advisors for a one year term to research and document the potential of distributed storage models, as well as develop an ethical framework within which such models would need to operate in order to benefit small cultural memory organizations. There will be an option to renew for a second year.
Institutional Partner Representatives will meet together quarterly via Zoom with Shift Collective and Historypin staff, Technical Advisors and Community-Based Archives Partners to discuss findings and move toward the drafting of an ethical framework and potential technical prototype. We will also hold broader public meetings quarterly to share our findings with the field. We will have one in-person meeting in New Mexico in October 2024 to review the decentralized storage prototype and make plans for broader testing in 2025.
We expect the voluntary time commitment to be about 2 hours per quarter on average, with a bit more time for testing/prototyping the storage nodes. Each Institutional/Storage Partner Representative will participate in quarterly calls and will be invited to join a Slack channel where you will be able to receive support around the prototype software we’re planning to deploy. Institutional Partners are expected to cover the cost of Representatives’ time (if necessary), and all expenses to attend the year-end convening. Institutional Partners will have the option to display their logo and support of this project on the project website, along with their own communications (with mutual approval). Additional sponsorship at the $5k and $10k level are available, which will provide travel support to community-based archives attending the in-person convening.
More about the prototype platforms we’re testing…
We are testing two different types of private storage networks during our Year 2 prototyping and are asking Institutional/Storage Partners to participate in the testing of each of these platforms. We are seeking to demonstrate that they can work for our needs while also learning more about what it would take for the partners to actually run these services. They will not be production servers and will only be used to display the use case, run testing, and understand the use cases better.
IPFS Private Network. We have been using IPFS Kubo for Go, a command line program. The requirements for that are here: https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/command-line/#system-requirements. We have been running one instance on a machine as small as a 4GB RAM Raspberry Pi4. There is an option to use Docker, and we are hoping to get a fix launched which would allow us to use the IPFS Desktop App to operate as part of a private swarm. https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-desktop/issues/2834
LOCKSS 2.0-beta1. See more about the beta version we’ll be using here. We will be using a private network with 3-5 nodes for purposes of our testing.
The LOCKSS Documentation Portal, which includes plugin/software developer and network admin guides, is here:https://docs.lockss.org/en/latest/index.html
And the LOCKSS 20.-beta1 System Manual, which includes system requirements and configuration details, is here:https://docs.lockss.org/projects/manual/en/latest/
Funding
