Open
The knowledge holder or community permits public sharing under the recorded terms.
RFI Digital Commons
Knowledge Keeper
A free tool for documenting community and indigenous knowledge with care, offline, and without uploading sensitive material to anyone.
Test version 0.1Why it exists
Documentation that leaves knowledge with the people who hold it.
Knowledge Keeper gives people a structured, ethical and locally controlled way to record oral histories, practices, ecological observations and related evidence—without sending that material to RFI or any other server.
It grows out of RFI’s research ethics and the approach of the Ghana Living Systems Initiative: consent revisited throughout, community authority over restricted knowledge, clear agreements on use, and knowledge returned to the people who hold it.
Knowledge Keeper helps you document a consent process. It does not replace one.
Who it is for
- Community organisations and cultural or knowledge initiatives
- Researchers, students and research assistants
- NGOs and civil-society field teams
- Archivists, educators and documentation practitioners
- Local institutions documenting community memory, environment or livelihoods
What it does
- Projects and structured knowledge records, saved automatically on your device
- A clear ethics and rights section that must be completed before a record is marked complete
- Search and filter by category, status, tag and access level
- Backup files you can keep safe and restore on any device
- Exports to JSON, a spreadsheet (CSV) and a printable report, with a warning before restricted records are included
- Works offline once opened or installed from this website
Access levels
Every record says what may be done with it.
Each record carries one of six access levels, chosen with the knowledge holder or community. The level is always visible, and restricted records trigger a warning before export.
Attributed
Sharing is permitted, but the recorded attribution must be given.
Research-use only
May be used for the stated research or documentation purpose, but not published widely.
Community-restricted
Intended only for authorised community or internal use.
Sensitive / do not share
Kept on the device, and left out of normal exports unless the user deliberately overrides a warning.
Custom restrictions
Conditions set out in the knowledge holder’s or community’s own words.
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. Knowledge Keeper never sends record content, names, places, tags, attachments or project titles to RFI, to analytics or to any third party, and it does not use your records for AI of any kind.
- If a phone or laptop is lost, stolen or broken, its records 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 records.
- Private or incognito windows delete everything when they close.
- Browsers can remove stored data on their own, especially when space is low. Installing the tool reduces this risk; regular backups are the real protection.
- On a shared computer, anyone using the same browser can open the tool and see its records.
- The first version has no password and does not encrypt records or backup files.
- There is no syncing between devices. To move work, make a backup and restore it on the other device.
A password-protected backup file is being considered for a future version.
At a glance
Free, and only from this website.
Open or install Knowledge Keeper 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
- Files
- Records details about photos, audio and documents; the files themselves stay where they are