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.

Imagine a world where every community has the data, information and knowledge it needs to make informed decisions about the land they call home. A world where the power of information is harnessed to hold leaders accountable for managing essential natural resources sustainably. This is the transformative potential of open and accessible land data in the fight against climate change, which is the defining challenge of our time, threatening the lives and livelihoods of communities worldwide.

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.

The Land Portal Foundation, in partnership with Transparency International, hosted the webinar titled "Breaking New Ground: Insights and Stories on the Impact of Land Corruption on Discriminated Groups in Africa." The webinar brought together a panel of distinguished experts to delve into the challenges and complexities of corruption intertwined with discrimination in land rights and governance. This session provided crucial insights through detailed case studies and expert analyses, offering pathways towards more equitable land management practices.

We appreciated all of the people who took the time to leave comments, write emails, and take the poll. We heard you, and based on what we heard, we won’t be making any wholesale changes right now in how we refer to countries and regions that have historically been left out of economic and industrialized development. We are particularly sensitive to the idea that the term Majority World could, as Rafael wrote, “perpetuate a notion that could undermine the importance of minority groups. It appears to replicate the very idea that the worth or relevance of a group is tied to its size, which is a concept many of us are striving to move away from, especially those of us engaged in addressing the vulnerabilities of minority populations.”