Community Spotlight: Archive.Earth

At Arweave, it has always been our goal to enable a decentralised network that is driven by our community, ultimately becoming rich in knowledge and encouraging unobstructed, free-flow of information. The last few months at Arweave HQ have seen us focus on development of the permaweb and partnership integrations; however, some of our community have been busy working on their own projects using the Arweave protocol.

We’d like to introduce Archive.Earth: an open system for critical environmental data that needs to be internationally distributed and permanent. A project conceived and advanced by some of our community members, Archive.Earth provides dedicated access to the Arweave for high-importance data to help ensure critical environmental knowledge remains protected in permanent and accessible infrastructures. The system is now being enhanced in functionality to encourage participation (submission, review, and fact-checking) by anyone, anywhere, anytime, aiming to protect us from generational amnesia about environmental degradation, known as the “shifting baseline syndrome”.

Its goals are to:

• Help evidence-based methods to repair/maintain the planetary environment
• Support a push to reproducible science; improving methods and research
• Answer the call for more robust computer media

What is Archive.Earth?

Today, the trusted position of government scientific institutions has become vulnerable to political interference. Critical data can be deleted, overwritten, or redirected, without precautions that are beyond the awareness and technical ability of most people. The organizations supporting Archive.Earth want to ensure that public knowledge remains adequately protected and accessible, by creating an independent, open-access digital portal for critical, at-risk information to be permanently archived — averting risk of destruction or manipulation by national politics.

Together with Arweave’s technology, Archive.Earth has built a platform in which environmental statistics can be collected, stored, and protected. They will work with communities and groups to curate high quality, trusted information useful for democratic governance, scientific reproducibility, and encourage ‘planetary-scale’ innovation. Anybody can submit information (maps, documents, images, data, etc), and store them permanently, though subsidized archiving requires approval by a (relevant) curation team. Features of the system include:

● Permanence: Uses Arweave’s decentralized data storage technology to prevent information loss

● Catalogued: All data gets a unique, unchanging Archived.Earth address to ensure easy content recall and organization

● Uncensorable: The system prevents any data from being altered or censored

● Open: Everyone can upload data onto the platform. Data can be set for public view on the permaweb

● Collaborative: Features to crowdsource, crowdfilter, and crowd-apply archives

● Governance: All submitted data is subject to peer-review and voting before archival

For us at Arweave, it’s great to see projects such as Archive.Earth utilising our technology to build platforms that endeavour to leave positive impact on the planet. We hope this is the first of many apps, projects, and platforms to implement the Arweave protocol and we can’t wait to see what other projects our community are building.

To find out more about Archive.Earth, head over to their website.

If you think that permanent, distributed data storage could be the key to your project, get in touch with us — we wanna hear more!