15 YEARS OF THE LAND PORTAL
CELEBRATING A MORE OPEN AND INCLUSIVE LAND SECTOR
This year, the Land Portal marks 15 years in action. We began as a simple, yet ambitious, website in 2009 by aggregating fragmented land data for people searching for free, reliable information to support land rights protection for vulnerable people.
Back then, land stakeholders were still searching in the dark for concrete, reliable data related to land. Broad aspects, like the link between land and food security, or land and climate, had yet to be comprehensively documented. There was also urgency to improve information, as some actors were exploiting the blind spot while carrying out abusive land practices, including land grabs.
We have stayed true to our original goals, but we haven’t stayed static. Tackling issues through independent research, connecting land to other development agendas, bringing cutting-edge data principles to land information, fostering vigorous debates – the Land Portal has evolved into an anchor for the land governance community.
We have held up our microphone to diverse voices. Anyone can still register and add their data and perspectives to our platform. Our collaborators range from global organizations to individuals and small civil society communities. We pick up topics such as sextortion, carbon markets, and data justice before they go mainstream.
We have crafted easily approachable content to help users get an instant look or dive deep into the land governance situations in countries. Our thematic portfolios put land into context by covering issues from land conflicts to corruption, food security to gender, climate change, urban and forest tenure, indigenous land rights and much more.
From the beginning, the Land Portal’s unique differentiator was our embrace of the open knowledge movement – the idea that knowledge should be free to use, reuse, and redistribute with as few legal, social, and technological restrictions as possible. We were early adopters in our use of open source software, linked open data, and open licensing. The start-up approach is in the DNA of the Land Portal, and it’s what allowed us to leverage our open data beliefs to embark on another ambitious programme - to document the State of Land Information. We shed light on the levels of completeness and openness of land data around the world to create more conversations.
Throughout it all, we built a community based on trustworthy and unbiased information. The data and information landscape has changed in the last 15 years and will continue to evolve at an ever increasing pace. There are more organizations collecting land data, more attention paid to land-related data, and more artificial intelligence tools that are being used for land governance, with uncertain outcomes. We are paying attention to our users’ evolving needs and remain laser-focused on growing with the global land governance community.
“As we celebrate our history, our energies are concentrated on the future. We’ll continue to ask ourselves what we can do better, where we can improve in serving our users, and how we can innovate,” says Laura Meggiolaro, Managing Director. Thank you to all our users over the years and the donors who have supported the Land Portal.
Read + Watch: 15th Anniversary Celebration Messages
Read: Laura Meggiolaro's Reflections
Please stay tuned for more information about events, blogs, and content for our 15th anniversary.
Blogs
Celebrating Fifteen Years of Open: The Land Portal’s Journey to Creating Communities of Practice
Since its beginnings, the Land Portal has been founded in a spirit of openness and, with one of its primary goals being providing wide access to land governance information. The Land Portal, however, was created at a time where the opportunities to inform and open up the debate on land issues and thinking around the importance of open land data were much more limited. When I first came to know of the Land Portal’s work, long before I joined the team, social media was still very much in its infancy, the open data movement was just taking off and technology was only beginning to become personal and portable. These significant changes would eventually lead to a world in which technology touches nearly everything we do, considerably changing the nature of the Land Portal’s work.
Dr. Ritu Verma was a Board of Director of the Land Portal Foundation for two consecutive terms
As the Land Portal celebrates a decade and half of ground-breaking and impactful work in the area of knowledge-sharing on land rights and struggles across the globe, it has a lot to be proud of.
In the early 1990s, in 1993 to be precise, perhaps wanting to emulate the concept of the "End of History" promoted by Francis Fukuyama, the U.S. government, thinking that with the dissolution of the Soviet Union the agrarian issue was disappearing from the international agenda, requested the FAO to eliminate the Agrarian Reform Service, of which I was a member.
At 15 years, it’s fun to reflect on the Land Portal’s beginnings. Someone recently asked me if there was a time when I thought the Land Portal wouldn’t make it, and I could instantly recall those moments. There were times when I flew from Rome to Berlin or Rotterdam, including with my infant son to meet our first potential donor, only to hear that we weren’t successful. Or before, when the Land Portal was a small project under the joint oversight of the International Land Coalition and landtenure.info consortium. Despite the great initial support they provided in bringing the Land Portal to life, none of us was completely sure if it could fulfill its potential without becoming an independent, neutral organization with its own funding. There were more recent times too. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we fought to keep our operations going as uncertainty changed everything around us.
In the beginning
Back in 2009, when I joined a meeting of the International Land Coalition, the Land Portal was on the agenda, and they were looking for people to be part of the steering committee in order to give shape to the future of the Land Portal. One of my two focus areas in research is land and property in general. The other focal is family law, by the way. I was interested in doing something internationally, and I wanted to explore the possibilities regarding research related land on an international level. I joined the committee together with the representatives of other organizations. From that moment on, I got interested in the work of the Land Portal, I got to know how it functions, and past initiatives on land information and data.