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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

The archive includes public PECE essays (largely organized by thematic topic, e.g.

The archive has connected users through synchronous discussion facilitated on Zoom. This is a small group of self-selected 5 people or so. Most of these people did not know each other but through working together over the past 18 months or so, have gotten to know each other and have now even met in person at events in Nairobi, for example. There is also a broader email list serv that links about 20 members but is mostly blast emails out (rather than conversation). Finally, at the Nov.

RDS working group members as well as other researchers who have been enrolled at various points in time (for example, a research assistant working with me during my fieldwork; a collaborator who conducted participant observation during the Nov 2019 event; a collaborative co-creator of a digital exhibit for 4S 2019) have primarily used the uploading of data function and annotation function, what I think of as the “bread and butter” of PECE. Most of the “assembling” of a PECE essay has been done by me (interesting to think about why… is it a technical issue?).