Natalie Cadranel

I am the Founder and Executive Director of the nonprofit OpenArchive, where we work to transform tools of extraction into tools for liberation. Rooted in human rights advocacy and internet freedom, I repurpose technology to reclaim digital histories, ensuring media, as a form of power, remains in the hands of the people. Archives build resilience so that no story is silenced, no evidence is lost, and communities retain control over their own histories.

For the last two decades, I have worked at the intersection of human rights, policy, design, and technology to improve internet freedom, protect rights, and upend systemic inequality. During my time at the ISchool and since, I sharpened my focus to address the crisis of convergence of our media on big tech platforms that chill free speech by expanding access to information and strengthening digital civil society. My work, rooted in participatory research, bridges and leverages archival innovation, ethical design, and strategic collaborations to unite, build on, and amplify the efforts of international digital rights organizations. 

At OpenArchive, we work with human rights defenders, eyewitnesses, journalists, and archivists worldwide to build easy-to-use, FLOSS mobile tools and resources to safeguard eyewitness evidentiary media. Conceived at the ISchool, I built on this research to create the org's flagship privacy-first archiving app. Save, which helps people securely archive, verify, and encrypt their mobile media. It does so by leveraging authentication, Creative Commons licensing, and secure transit via TLS and Tor to route media to various, ethical backends, including, the Internet Archive, FLOSS webDAV servers like Nextcloud, and OA's custom FLOSS p2p backend on the decentralized web.

While at the ISchool, I worked with Meedan and Common Crawl to expand the reach and use of fact-checking and open knowledge tools for journalists and scholars, respectively. Some of this research is documented in her published paper: Preserving Mobilised Culture. 

I am a former advisory board member of the film archive, iotaCenter, a journalist with the IndyBay chapter of IndyMedia, and led media reform efforts while finishing my BA in International Relations at UC Davis.

I ♥️ and support community archives, media justice, and grassroots bicycling advocacy organizations.