How can we preserve our digital legacies over the long term? I propose the establishment of an enterprise whose mission is that preservation.
There are two separate but compatible reasons to create an enterprise: to bring in money and to provide a service that ought to be available but doesn’t yet exist. The enterprise I am proposing would be a nonprofit corporation that would organize and maintain a public digital archive. The archive is designed so that it will endure as long as humanity endures. I was inspired by the perpetual care that many cemeteries offer. Possible models would be the Harvard Board of Overseers or the MIT Corporation.
I call this enterprise “The Perpetual Public Digital Archive”, or the Archive for short. Here is the essence of its business plan. The Archive will have a self-perpetuating endowment, managed by a Board of Trustees. When a Trustee leaves the Board either through death or resignation, the surviving Trustees recruit a replacement. A primary responsibility of a Trustee is to ensure the continuity of the Archive by ensuring the continuity of its management.
The price of placing an item in the Archive is is set so as to ensure that the interest will cover the ongoing expenses of the Archive, including of course the salaries of its Trustees. The Archive is feasible — money earns interest and an endowment produces a stream of interest income. That income covers the operating expenses of the Archive and pays the salaries of the Trustees. The salaries of the Trustees should be set to whatever is necessary to motivate them to join the Board and carry out their responsibilities.
The primary purpose of a profit-making organization is to enrich its stockholders. Other purposes might exist, but those purposes are secondary. If a profit-making organization becomes wealthy, its stockholders will and should be receptive to a buyout offer that would end its independent existence.The Archive is organized as a nonprofit for the same reason that hospitals, cemeteries, and universities are usually organized as nonprofits: to ensure its continued existence.
There are certainly existing digital archives such as OneDrive and Dropbox, but these are run by profit-making corporations. The corporations that operate them do not commit to operating them forever. Unlike OneDrive and Dropbox, the only obligations of the Archive are to preserve and make available its contents and to maintain its own existence.
If you believe that your intellectual property has permanent value and want to ensure that it is not lost to posterity, you wold do well to preserve it in the Archive. That’s how I feel about my essays, how my sister Nan might feel about her poetry, and indeed how many people feel about their creations. Anything capable of being digitized could be preserved in the Archive, including visual images, music, and multimedia artworks.
The service provided by the Archive would be unique; nothing else would compete with it except for another public archive. (There’s no reason why there can’t be more than one such archive.) The price charged for placing a document in the Archive would be what it costs to put it there, plus what it costs to preserve it, plus the overhead of maintaining the Archive in perpetuity. An initial endowment would be necessary but it could be repaid.
As to the technology, the technologies now used by various organizations to preserve and safeguard their records would suffice over the short term. Over the long term, different technology would undoubtedly be necessary. I don’t know what that technology will turn out to be, but the Board would have the responsibility of identifying it and applying it to the Archive.
Trustees would be recruited so as to provide the range of expertise necessary to manage the Archive. Although it would not be a requirement, I would anticipate that a Trustee would want to place some of their own material in the Archive. Trustee compensation would be the fair-market price of services rendered. The Founding Trustee (or Trustees) would formulate the Bylaws of the Archive and recruit the other Trustees. The Founder would necessarily have to believe in the concept of the Archive and have enough entrepreneurial abilities to make it all happen.
The Board of Trustees will have many policy questions to resolve. What should be the rules and procedures for accessing the Archive? Should there be any limitations on what can be placed in the Archive? Should there be a sunset rule on confidentiality? I don’t propose to enumerate these issues, much less resolve them; these will be questions for the Trustees to answer.
The Archive would be recorded in a distributed database, but it would still need a location for the primary storage of its records. That location should be someplace both politically and environmentally stable, unlikely to be disrupted by anything short of a meteorite strike, The town of Visp in Switzerland, which I once passed through, struck me as an interesting possibility, though I admittedly don’t know very much about it.
The Board of Trustees should be no larger than necessary. The Board members need not all live in the same location. Administering the Archive would probably not be a full-time job once the Archive has been created. If the Archive is to be created, it needs a Founding Trustee. I’m just too old and I just don’t have enough energy to take on that responsibility myself, but I’m hoping that by publicizing the idea I can induce someone else to come forward.
The mission of the Archive is complementary to the mission of Medium. Medium’s mission is to publish, not to preserve. Being a profit-making enterprise, Medium has no inherent stake in its survival beyond the lifetimes of the people who run it. But the people who write for Medium clearly care about their writing beyond the income it produces. The Archive would enable Medium authors to preserve for posterity the writing they care so much about.