1. Taking Land Governance Performance Data Monitoring to the Next Level
Towards a Uniform Vision for Data Standards
March 19th 2018
Hi everybody, my name is Lisette Mey and I work for the Land Portal Foundation.
I want to talk to you today about how we can take Land data monitoring to the next level and specifically try to stimulate some extra thought to our attitude when it comes to data collection and monitoring, that has become increasingly important in the SDG context and beyond.
We want to make sure that data collection and monitoring does not happen for the sake of this great momentum around data – but that it actually drives the changes and ensures that improved land governance becomes a national and global priority.
From the Land Portal’s neutral position towards data, we want to ask all data providers and people in the sector that work with data, to really take a step back and consider: for what purpose are we collecting data and for whom?

2. What is data?
Everything is data
This publication is data.

3. What is data?
Everything is data
This excel file is data.

4. What is data? Everything is data This is data.
Polling exercise: what kind of information do you have? Would you like it to be used by others? If yes, how? Intended for anyone in particular?
How can you make sure that your information is part of the landscape.

5. Data is of value when it is delivered into the hands of the right people in the right context
In every situation where someone deals with data, whether it is collecting data, whether you are analyzing it, managing it or publishing – you have to consider your target audience and how your data should be used.
Ultimately, data is of most value when it is delivered to the right people and in the right context. That’s where it drives change you seek.
The data we collaboratively collect every day is of a different value in each different context. Raw data such as the millions of photos by satellites might mean very little to a local farmer, but should be analyzed and digested by specialists to be able draw conclusions like land cover changes, or even identify community settlements over time.
Advocacy institutions need data in the form of powerful and gripping stories from the ground to use as convincing messages to put the land rights issue under global attention and political agendas.
Sometimes information should reach farmers or slum dwellers, so they have the right information to be empowered against outside threats.
This environment, where information flows from one person and context to another and is applied and built on in each step of its journey, is what we like to call “the information ecosystem”.

6. Introducing the Information Ecosystem
Should reach its destination
People
Have their unique role to play
Attitude
Collaborating, Learning, Feedback
Infrastructure
That enables information to flow
Data & Information – an essential building block of the information ecosystem. You can compare this to the cars in a city. Allowing information to go from one place to the other and reaching its destination;
People – As in a natural ecosystem and in a city, people have their own roles to play in an information ecosystem. As I mentioned before, certain types of data that require highly specialized skills to understand and analyze, need to be digested by those people that possess those skills. They pass it on to other people, who can build on their products, etc. We all have our own capacities and skills to bring into the mix;
Attitude – The ecosystem is also about attitude. Like traffic in a city, for it to go smoothly, you need the attitude to consider other people and cars, and realize that the roads are not your own.
This collaborative and considerate attitude is also needed in an information ecosystem. Collaboration is necessary across sectors and countries to avoid duplication of efforts and to work as efficiently as possible;
It is also an attitude of wanting learning from information and really take the time to think about what this information is telling us. A publication should not only be an opportunity to be visible for a time, but we collectively need to think about what the information is telling us. The publication quota in the academic sector has the very real risk that researchers barely scratch the surface of their research before they have to move on to the next publication;
It is also about the attitude to give feedback when you do use your data. Giving feedback on how the information was valuable or not valuable for a user only makes our data better. We need to be open to feedback and we should really have a culture in which giving feedback when we use data is the norm;
Infrastructure - Finally, in a city, the cars and people can’t move if there is no infrastructure. You need the roads for the information to flow from one place to another and reach the destination - the person and context in which it is most valuable. We need to have the technical infrastructure that allows information to flow.
This is the situation, the ecosystem we should strive to achieve. But we are not there yet.

7. Four main issues Not sharing data Not looking beyond usual networks
Not being able to digest all information that exists
Not considering the user of information
The issues that we see with regards to the current practice of data sharing, are roughly categorized as follows:
Not sharing your data
Much too often people are hesitant to share their data. A reason we often hear is lack of resources or fear of information being misused or taken out of context.
Sure these might be valid reasons to choose not to publish data. But considering we are all want to improve land rights, and you of course believe your information is of value in that context – you have a responsibility to make sure that the right people can use and build on what you’ve done.
You can increase the impact of your data by sharing it with people so much – and when people use it, they might actually come with feedback that improves your data.
One very valid constraint that I should mention for not publishing data are privacy constraints. Of course, making data open can also put vulnerable people in a dangerous position and that should be avoided at all costs. But too often the solution is then to not publish anything.. Whereas we would urge you to think about possibly anonymizing data. That data in itself could still give a lot of information and be of great value to a lot of people.
Not looking beyond the usual networks
People tend to stick to work with the people they know, and therefore work with the data of institutions they know.
Data-sharing should not be restricted to academic circles, or only shared within groups that speak the same language, or only in specific urban or rural networks. Insecurity of tenure is not an issue that is purely academic, or only applicable in a certain region or country, and it influences many different disciplines. This means that collaboration is a necessity, not a luxury. You don’t get anywhere in a city if you never ever move outside of your own neighborhood.
The risk of duplication of efforts and inefficient work is much too high if we just tend to stick to the people and networks we already know and want to be a part of. Try to look beyond your networks when you work on data and see where you can add value, or the other way around.
Though, this issue of working in siloes is not only an issue of not going out and finding other information sources outside the networks – it often is also a matter of not knowing which other sources are out there, or not knowing enough to determine whether they are reliable in your opinion to build on. Not everybody adheres to the same methodologies or standards.
Not being able to digest all the information that exists
We live in a time of big data. There is such an enormous wealth of information available on and offline, that it is simply humanly impossible to go through all of it and assess whether it is something relevant or of high enough quality for you to build on.
That is where we need the help of computers. Information needs to be machine-readable so that computers can go through the information for you and help you determine what is relevant and of high quality, and what is not.
As an information provider, you have the responsibility to make sure that your information is findable, so that it is indexed and machine readable. That sounds more technical than it actually is, and I’ll show you in a moment.
Not considering the user of your information
But first, the fourth issue is that publishers of information do not consider the user of their information enough. You constantly have to go back to that saying: where is my information of most value and in whose hands?
In that regard, you really need to think about your user and what they need to be able to use your information.
That means you need to think about open licenses! I can’t tell you how much information is licensed with ‘All Rights reserved” or how often people don’t put anything. That means that users individually need your explicit permission to use your data in the way they want to. This of course is highly discouraging!
Another thing that is important for a user, is to know basic things about your data. What was your methodology for collecting, when was it published, who is the source. As a data aggregator at the Land Portal, I can’t tell you how many resources are indexed without a tracable source. What is the inevitable result of that – nobody uses your data, because they can’t check the provenance.
Basically, we need better data management practices.

8. How can we solve this?
Enough of highlighting what is wrong. What can we do to make the first steps towards this information ecosystem? I am going to highlight that to you in four simple steps.

9. Step 1: Publish your data
The first step is simple, be sure to publish your information online. When you do that, consider the format you upload it in. Make sure it is machine readable – meaning that a computer does not need software to read and understand it. And that is nothing technical, it is really about hitting save as “XML” in Excel, and you’re done.

10. Step 2: Consider Licenses
A second step that many people know about but would rather not get into because it is something that is more for lawyers - is licensing.
There is a common misunderstanding between licenses and copyright. You will always be the copyright owner as the creator of the information. The license determines whether and how people can re-use your information.
With the Land Portal we do not tell you to use license A or B, we simply want you to consider a license for the work that you are doing, because if you don’t specify a license - it is automatically All Rights Reserved. And for an All Rights Reserved license, people have to go to you as a copyright owner and ask explicit permission to use the information in the way they plan to use it. This decreases the impact of your work considerably.
The ‘public domain’, where your information is out there on the web free to use and misuse, is not the only alternative to this. There is a whole spectrum of Creative Commons licenses in between. You do not even need a lawyer to determine the license you want. You simply go to creative commons.org and tick a few boxes of what you do and don’t want to happen with your information - and it spits out a license for you.
Polling exercise: Do you know what licenses are applied to your information?

11. Structure information
Step 3:
Structure information
Metadata
Reliability
The next step is to structure the information you publish. You need to have good metadata. Metadata is information about your information, describing what a user will find when they go to your full publication or dataset.
Using a structured way to define your metadata that ensures that both users and a machine understands what is in your information. You need to structure according to a standard metadata model. A metadata model is are the fields you have to fill in, like ‘title’, ‘abstract’, ‘date of publication’, etc.).
This may seem trivial, but a date of publication says a lot about the resources, as does the type of resource (a peer-reviewed article may seem more trustworthy than a promotional material from an organization.
One other essential part is the publisher. We talked about how to find reliable information - acknowledging where the information came from is extremely important. As a user, you can trace the information back to the original organization and check its reputation and procedures before deciding to use their information. You can also include the methodology used to obtain the data in the metadata, so a user is able to determine its warrant.
Very important to use standard metadata models.
Polling exercise: Who is responsible to publish your information? Do you know if they structure your information?

12. Step 4: Use Standards Geographically Topically
Whenever you fill in your metadata, make sure that you are using standards as much as possible to classify information. These exists for countries, for resource types, for dates, etc. Of course we know that “Laos”, “Lao PDR” or “Laos People’s Democratic republic” are the same, but a computer does not. Standards have been developed to make sure that these elements that are common sense to a human, also make sense for a computer.
The Land Portal Foundation has even developed a standard for topical keywords related to land governance, LandVoc. This is an extremely powerful way to make content more discoverable.

13. Establishing Information ecosystem Topical standard: LandVoc
Assigns machine-readable code to land-related concepts
A code can hold certain information:
Definitions (one or more)
Translations
Synonyms (and translations of synonyms)
Related terms (and more specific relationships)
Scope notes
And more.
A topical standard assigns a unique code to each land-related concepts. That code can ‘hold’ a lot of information about this concept, definitions, translations, synonyms and more.
The code is machine-readable, so a machine will know that if this concept is used, that this means all those things - definitions, synonyms and translations. A machine knows these are the same things.
And this is extremely powerful, especially with a topic like land governance, that is global, extremely local, debated in many languages and very politically sensitive.

14. Establishing the Information Ecosystem Topical standard: LandVoc
Upload document in database tagged with ‘slums’
Computer connects tag with the machine-readable code
User queries database with search term, e.g.:
Informal settlements
Kampungs c_
SLUMS
Townships
Favela
Ghetto
Let me try to illustrate this with a concrete example from a publisher’s point of view.
When I upload a resource and tag it with ‘slums’, a database where this standard is implemented, will automatically link this with the code the concept is associated with. So when a user queries this same database for a synonym or related term of ‘slums’, the machine will know that the information I just uploaded as ‘slums’ might very well also be of interest to the user and returns this among the search results.
This makes information much, much more discoverable.

15. Thank you www.landportal.org