Workshop: Open Data and Land Governance: Moving Towards an Information Ecosystem

Objectives of the Workshop

Present the work of the Cadasta Foundation, the Land Portal Foundation and the Land Alliance, Inc. and Southern partners in working towards an open data system.

  • Explore possibilities for the Legend partnership to jointly advocate and promote open data and metadata about other information sources.
  • Assess organizational approaches of Legend partners in using standardized vocabularies and explore the potential adopting LandVoc among Legend partners as the basis for the information ecosystem on land.

Part I: Presentations

  • Keynote: visionary message on the potential of  open data
  • Report out on Land Debate
    • What themes come out
    • Challenges / Impacts
      • Complexities
      • Risk / Benefit
  • Presentation from the Land Portal on linked open data and LandVoc - the Linked Land Governance Thesaurus
  • Lightning Talks from Malcolm Chldress from Land Alliance, Inc, featuring the Global Property Rights Index (PRINDEX) and the experiences of partners from the South with open data.

Part II: Interactive Workshop

Activities

Participants will be split up into small groups based upon the outcome of the assessment of Legend partners[1], with one facilitator for each group. As the assessment will have already identified the types of data and the structure of data that each organization uses, each participant will write down on sticky notes information about what star were given to them and what practical steps their organization need to take towards becoming part of the information ecosystem, whether this would be applying the right license or adopting the right technology to open a dataset, adopting a standard metadata schemes, begin annotating content using standardized vocabularies, etc.

As a group, participants will share the results and discuss guided questions aimed at helping organizations identify their data needs and understanding where their organization fits within the open data value chain. Finally, the session will aim to help organizations identify new ways they might use existing datasets going forward.

Part III: Officially adopting open data and standardized vocabularies as the common approach of the Legend Partnership

This final session of the workshop will be an open discussion aimed at creating a declaration among Legend partners to officially endorse Open Data principles and support existing efforts towards adopting open data standards and tools in their Legend related work.

The declaration should also include a commitment/endorsement by DFID to have Open Data as one cross-cutting  thematic focus of the future LEGEND work.

The discussion will be based upon a prepared draft, but the outcomes will be open for alteration and discussion based upon the results of the workshop.

The declaration will be delivered to the Legend partners meeting for consideration and official adoption.

Target audience

Legend Partners taking part in the World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2017 will be the target audience of this workshop.  Specifically, the attendance of those responsible for the technical development of Legend partner web platforms would be crucial to making this workshop a success.