About the Data Donation Module
DDM is an open-source web application to collect data donations,
developed at the University of Zurich in Switzerland
Our Mission: Making Data Donations Accessible for All Researchers
We built DDM so that any researcher can design a data donation study—regardless of technical background.
Open Source
DDM is open-source and free to use. A single installation can support multiple projects from different researchers, making it practical for universities or departments to share infrastructure. But realistically, self-hosting requires technical knowledge and ongoing maintenance that not every researcher has access to.
DDM as a Service
That's why we offer a hosted version. For a fee, researchers without technical infrastructure can run their data donation studies on our platform—no server setup, no maintenance, just research.
DDM's History
The Motivation
Motivated by our research interest to better understand the use and effects of digital media platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, we began to explore data donation—an approach where users contribute their own platform data directly to research.
Institutional Context
In 2021, we founded the Data Donation Lab at the University of Zurich to connect researchers exploring the opportunities of data donations for their research and to build a tool that makes data donation accessible to researchers from any background.
First Release in 2022
DDM launched on PyPi in March 2022 and has been actively developed since—regular updates, new features, all open-source.
Since then, researchers have used DDM to collect data from platforms including YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, ChatGPT, Google Search, and Fitbit, collecting data donations from several thousand participants in a transparent, secure and ethically grounded manner.
The People Behind It
Nico Pfiffner, PhD
Developed DDM as part of his PhD which he defended in 2024.
Prof. Thomas Friemel
Try DDM out
Create a free account on our EU-hosted, GDPR-compliant platform and see how it works.
Free accounts include one project with up to five test participants—enough to explore the full workflow. When you're ready to run your study, upgrading is easy.
You can also host DDM yourself: DDM is open-source and can be installed on your own server. Self-hosting requires technical knowledge (server setup, Django, database) and access to reliable infrastructure.