Project and questions
Purpose, place, team, dates, ethics approval, and the research questions the fieldwork is trying to answer.
RFI Digital Commons
FieldKit
A free, offline companion for ethical fieldwork: questions, participants, consent, notes and evidence, kept together and kept on your own device.
Test version 0.1Why it exists
Careful fieldwork, without the scattered notebooks.
Fieldwork produces a lot: consent conversations, notes written at the end of long days, photos and recordings on several devices, and promises to return results. When these are scattered, it is easy to lose track of what each person agreed to.
FieldKit keeps a project’s questions, coded participants, consent records, guides, notes and evidence register together. It works offline, so it can be used where connections are poor, and nothing leaves your device. It reflects the commitments in RFI’s research ethics: consent revisited throughout, care with what is recorded, and knowledge returned to the people who shared it.
FieldKit helps you record consent. It does not replace your ethics approval or the consent conversation itself.
Who it is for
- Students doing fieldwork for a thesis or project
- Researchers and research assistants
- NGO and programme teams gathering evidence
- Evaluators, documentation practitioners and community researchers
What it does
- Project setup with research questions and ethics approval details
- Participants identified by codes such as P01, never by name
- A consent log showing each participant’s current status and what they agreed to
- Interview and focus group guides you can print and take into the field
- Field notes with templates, a visit log, follow-ups and simple coding of themes
- An evidence register recording where each photo, recording or document is kept
In a project
Everything a fieldwork project needs, in one place.
Use the parts you need, in any order. Notes and evidence that are sensitive, or linked to someone who has not consented, are left out of exports unless you deliberately include them.
Participants
People and groups taking part, identified by codes such as P01 rather than names.
Consent log
Each consent conversation: how it was given, what was agreed, and any later change of mind.
Interview and FGD guides
Questions with probes, each linked to a research question, ready to print.
Field notes
Templates for field notes, observations, interview summaries and reflections.
Visit log
Where you went, what happened, and what comes next.
Evidence register
Photos, recordings and documents, with where each file is kept. The files themselves stay where they are.
Follow-ups and coding
Promises to keep and results to return, and codes that mark themes across notes and evidence.
Your data
Stays on your device. Here are the honest limits.
What you enter is saved only in your own browser on your own device. FieldKit never sends notes, consent records, codes, file details or project titles to RFI, to analytics or to any third party, and it does not use your projects for AI of any kind.
- If a phone or laptop is lost, stolen or broken, its projects are gone unless a backup exists somewhere else.
- Clearing browser data for this website, some phone clean-up apps, or uninstalling the app can delete projects.
- On a shared computer, anyone using the same browser can open the tool. The first version has no password and does not encrypt projects or backup files, so never enter participants’ names or contact details.
- FieldKit records details about files but does not store photos, recordings or documents.
- There is no syncing between devices or team members. To move work, make a backup and restore it on the other device.
- It is not a survey platform and does not collect responses from participants directly.
At a glance
Free, and only from this website.
Open or install FieldKit from this page. There are no app-store versions and no copies hosted elsewhere.
- Version
- 0.1 (test version)
- Price
- Free
- Account
- None needed
- Works on
- Current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, on computers, tablets and phones
- Install
- From this website, using your browser’s own install option
- Exports
- Printable fieldwork summary and guides (print or save as PDF), evidence register and field notes (CSV), JSON