Infrastructure: The Data Donation Module

As part of the data donation lab, we have developed an open source web application that facilitates data donations for academic research. This application is called "Data Donation Module" (DDM).

How to use the Tool

The data donation lab currently hosts an instance of DDM that can be used by all interested researchers working at the Zurich higher education institutions - just visit the following site and login with your UZH-email-address to try out and use the application: https://datadonation.uzh.ch/ddm/login/

Key Features of DDM as part of the Data Donation Lab

The Data Donation Modules covers the following key features:

  • Researchers can create and manage their own data donation projects, without having to set up their own server or infrastructure.
  • Researchers can manage their project through a graphical user interface, and no in-depth programming knowledge is necessary.
  • Researchers can define pre-processing and filtering operations, that will be upload to data donations on the client-side, before the data is transmitted to the University's servers.
  • All data donations are encrypted and stored securely on internal database servers of the University of Zurich.
  • Data donors can donate their data through a compact interface that combines donation instructions, the donation upload, donation feedback as well as donation consent.
  • Data donors can be redirected to an external survey platform at the and of their donation.
  • Researchers can monitor their ongoing data donation projects through real-time participation statistics and an extensive exception-log.

Background Information

DDM is developed by the division "Media Use and Effects" of the Department of Communication and Media Research (University of Zurich) in collaboration with S3IT and will be hosted on servers managed by the Central IT department of the University of Zurich. Furthermore, the application is open-source and the code of the application is openly accessible on GitHub.