Kula Research Infrastructure — encrypted, offline-first field-research archive

A bespoke, offline-first, encrypted desktop archive for decades of Kula-ring field research — built around how the work is actually done in the communities.

The challenge

Prof. Dr. Susanne Kuehling (Department of Anthropology, University of Regina) researches the Kula ring across the entire Massim region, with a focus on Dobu and the southern Massim. The genuinely innovative part is the method: the research is done with and for the community — a team of up to 15 Kula masters collected the data on-site in the communities, oriented to the community's own needs. The result was decades of growing, irreplaceable — and culturally sensitive, community-owned — documentation, scattered across Excel. It needed structure, search, maps and a time dimension, while never leaving the researcher's machine or touching a cloud.

The approach

• Built a bespoke Flutter desktop app from the real fieldwork requirements — not a generic CRUD clone.
• Encrypted at rest (SQLCipher); a clean ETL pipeline and data model (objects → observations → stations → people/places).
• Three synchronised views of the same data over a single filter path: an Excel-like table, an OpenStreetMap map with object trajectories, and a 3D time view that lifts each valuable's journey over space and time.
• Media per object (photo/audio/video) with local, offline transcription (Whisper) and an optional local LLM ("ask the archive", Ollama) — no cloud.
• A multi-level sensitivity model mirroring community control over knowledge, plus full Excel/JSON export so the researcher always owns her data.

The result

• A working tool in real research use: over a thousand documented valuables and their journeys across the Massim region, searchable, mapped and 3D-visualised — fully offline and encrypted.
• Filtering/search spans every field (notes, source, year, holder, places, people); the table, map and 3D view stay consistent through one shared engine.
• Backed by an ADR-driven architecture, a broad automated test suite and CI.

What this demonstrates

• Requirements-driven, bespoke delivery — a real, demanding user workflow shipped end to end, not a demo.
• Data sovereignty as architecture (offline, encrypted, no cloud lock-in) — exactly the confidentiality/GDPR concern many small organisations have.
• Respectful handling of sensitive, community-owned data as a product principle (these screenshots are privacy-protected for that reason).
• Modern AI-assisted delivery, human-curated — fast and exploratory, steered by an engineer who owns architecture → build → deployment → docs.

Tech at a glance

Flutter · Dart · Riverpod · SQLite + SQLCipher · flutter_map / OSM · Whisper (local) · Ollama (local) · Excel I/O · CI

A note on the screenshots: the data shown is privacy-protected (blurred placeholders here, synthetic demo data going forward). The real records are community-collected knowledge and never appear in any public artefact — which is the whole point of the tool.

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