User:Blueandblack/Mukurtu Archive

Mukurtu is a free, mobile, open source content management system (CMS) built on Drupal. Mukurtu is designed in partnership with communities who want to share and manage their cultural heritage in a digital format. The name comes from the Warumungu community Dillybag–a safe keeping place for sacred materials. The project sparked discussion on Digital Rights Management and archival support of non-Western cultural protocols. Lawyer Wendy Seltzer describes, "Rather than fight copyright norms with bad code, we should learn from the Warumungu and build code (and law) to support social practice." Mukurtu mobile launched in 2015 for iPhone and iPad.

History
The idea for Mukurtu began with Kim Christen's anthropological research in the Central Australian town of Tennant Creek. There she worked with the Warumungu Aboriginal community to document local associations in the context of global politics. That research led to Christen's monograph Aboriginal Business, which discusses indigenous rights and cultural sovereignty. In 2007, Warumungu community members collaborated with Christen and Craig Dietrich to produce the Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive. According to the Mukurtu website, "Warumungu elder, Michael Jampin Jones chose Mukurtu (dillybag) as the name for the Warumungu community archive to remind users that the archive, too, is a safe keeping place where Warumungu people can share stories, knowledge, and cultural materials properly using their own protocols." Mukurtu grew from that single community archive to a content management system that now meets the needs of various communities worldwide.

Funding for the project has come from the Washington State University Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the Fetzer Institute and the World Intellectual Property Organization. Current team members include Kim Christen, Alex Merrill, Jane Anderson, Michael Wynne, and Lotus Norton Wisla.

Cultural Protocols
Cultural protocols make up the core of what Mukurtu considers its ethical content management system. Community defined cultural protocols allow users to determine differing levels of access to digital content. The feature allows communities to determine, according to their own values, who can access which heritage items, making it possible to protect sensitive materials meant only for community members or only for particular community members. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, the concept of community protocols covers a wide range of documents that outline how a community expects stakeholders to engage with them. They explain that a community protocol "articulating information, relevant factors, and details of customary laws and traditional authorities helps other stakeholders to better understand the community’s  values and customary laws."

Traditional Knowledge Labels
Mukurtu allows users to tag heritage items with a set of traditional knowledge (TK) labels. TK labels were developed by Local Contexts to help indigenous communities identify materials circulating outside a traditional context. Mukurtu recognizes that many indigenous materials exist in the public domain, without intellectual property rights, leaving them open to misuse or misrepresentation. The labels ask users to respect community protocols as they circulate or collect indigenous materials. Individual labels include sharing restrictions such as Family and Secret/Shared as well as labels similar to Creative Commons licenses such as Non-Commercial and Attribution.

Collections
This feature allows Mukurtu users to organize cultural materials into formal collections. Where as the cultural protocols organizes community access, collections organizes digital documents into different categories. Collections are non-exclusive, meaning individual items can belong to multiple categories.

Roundtrip
Roundtrip allows Mukurtu users to import and export collections without losing content or protocols. This feature helps ensure the integrity of digital files and their metadata, whether generated inside the content management system or not. Roundtrip accords with MD5 standards.