oa Data Donation Module: A Web Application for Collecting and Enriching Data Donations

Currently, few tools are openly available that researchers can use to collect data donations. The Data Donation Module (DDM) presented in this paper addresses this gap and provides a new solution for collecting data donations from citizens. The DDM is a web application that provides researchers with the means to guide participants through the data donation process, define rules on how the personal data provided by the participants are preprocessed and filtered before being transmitted to the researchers, and optionally enrich the donated data with the participants’ self-reports, collected through an integrated questionnaire. The design of the DDM builds on a particular set of principles that distinguishes it from other data donation tools. First, it can be deployed at an institutional level and can support multiple data donation projects simultaneously. Second, it emphasizes the usability of the application for both participants and researchers. Third, it offers additional built-in data enrichment features, such as the possibility to include information contained in a data donation in the integrated questionnaire. In this paper, we further elaborate on these principles, present the DDM’s core functionalities from both the participants’ and the researchers’ perspectives, and provide an outlook on the application’s accessibility and sustainability.