Building a Shared Knowledge Base for Data Donation: Join the DDP Tracker Initiative

The Data Donation Lab and the Weizenbaum Institute have organized a pre-symposium event at the Data Donation Symposium in Berlin. The goal of this “Data Donation Sprint” was to address the challenge of working with Data Download Packages (DDPs). Working with data donations requires a good understanding of what is inside these DDPs, yet this is challenging due to multiple reasons. The information included can be rather cryptic (what does “fovea” mean?), hard to interpret (what time zone does the timestamp refer to?), or difficult to compare across platforms (is a like on TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn the same?). Furthermore, DDPs may be inconsistent across access methods (API vs. download-upload), time (DDP changes without notice), space (country specific differences), and languages.

As the platforms do not provide sufficient documentation on all of this, we have decided to join forces to develop and maintain a DDP Tracker. The DDP Tracker will provide a joint knowledge base, for understanding DDPs of various platforms and thereby support the work of newbies to the field, experienced researchers, and IT developers alike.

The Data Donation Sprint in Berlin has brought together a motivated group of people that will continue the work on the DDP Tracker. However, more support is welcome. This can be done by sharing DDPs, annotating DDPs, coordinating the work for a specific platform, and/or financial support for the necessary technological infrastructure. If you would like to join this community project, please fill in the linked questionnaire by 15 November. This will help to coordinate the work and available resources.