Designing Digital Directives
The Permanent Legacy Foundation has implemented the first iteration of a legacy planning tool in our preservation-focused cloud storage platform. This tool allows our users to leave instructions to pass on their archive to a designated steward after their death or incapacitation. We see these instructions (directives) as a key part of our mission to preserve the digital legacy of all people. In this poster, we will share our understandings of digital legacy and highlight some foundational design principles for developing digital directives practices and/or mechanisms. We will examine our approach to building a tool that supports legacy planning on Permanent.org, in particular the user feedback that we sought and learned from along the way, and describe the schema and administrative settings we’ve created to support this feature in our platform. Finally, the poster will engage with challenges facing this existing system and our plans for future work.