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# About Dat

Dat's open source applications offer a new experience in advanced file syncing and publishing. Wherever your data goes, Dat uses innovative *in place archiving* to link files from many locations together. Share data with anyone over a distributed network using encrypted connections. Dat brings a new ease to public data management with automatic version history, persistent links, and dynamic storage.

Use Dat to distribute scientific data, browse remote files on demand, or run continuous file archiving. Integrate into your existing work flow with flexible storage options and http publishing. Dat connects existing web infrastructure with a modern technological foundation. Built on a decentralized network, Dat creates new opportunities for existing data publishing tools. Put data preservation at your finger tips, like never before, with user-first applications. **Secure**, **distributed**, **fast**.

With Dat, we want to make data sharing, publishing, and archiving fit into your workflow. Built with the needs of researchers, librarians, and developers in mind, Dat's unique design works wherever you store your data. You can keep files synced whether they're on your laptop, a public data repository, or in a drawer of hard drives. Dat securely ties all these places together, creating a dynamic data archive. Spend less time managing files, more time digging into data (unfortunately we cannot sort your hard drive drawer, yet).

[If you'd like you read more about how dat works, see our whitepaper.](https://github.com/datproject/docs/blob/master/papers/dat-paper.pdf)

## Built for the Public Good

Dat's distributed team builds Dat openly and compassionately. All software is open source and freely available to use. The [Dat project](http://datproject.org) is led by [Code for Science & Society](http://codeforscience.org) (CSS), a U.S. nonprofit. The mission of CSS is to work with public institutions to produce open source infrastructure for researchers, civic hackers, and journalists. We want to improve data access and long-term preservation. We actively welcome outside contributors and use cases beyond our mission.

Code for Science & Society hosts other open science initiatives including [Science Fair](https://github.com/codeforscience/sciencefair/), a desktop science library like nothing before, and [Stencila](https://github.com/stencila), the office suite for reproducible research. Science Fair uses Dat to distribute scientific literature. In the future, Stencila will use Dat for reproducible data analysis.

If you were looking to install dat, you're in the wrong place -- [installation is on a different page!](/install).