Citizens, through crowdsourcing / Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), are increasingly volunteering their knowledge, personal time and energy using the Internet and on-line tools to get work done, to obtain input and to stimulate action. Current applications include counting birds, checking water quality and creating new base mapping for developing countries – OpenStreetMap is the best example. Crowdsourcing has only recently been directly applied to the capture and management of land rights within the land administration sector.

 

Is it feasible and can it help to rapidly shrink the security of tenure chasm? This workshop will explore how we can engage citizens through crowdsourcing within a new citizen collaborative model for land administration that would be much more inclusive for the disadvantaged and vulnerable, increase access to land markets and help support poverty reduction.

 

The workshop will also investigate new exploitation, development and use methodologies of VGI derived information to various geographic and social scientific disciplines that make use of mapping, GIS, SIM and SDI systems and procedures. The aspiration is that these will give rise to the examination and legalisation of the legitimacy of big geodata and related processes and management procedures as a reliable spatial, environmental and sustainable infrastructure on local, as well as on global, scales.

 

Commission 7 WORKSHOP Theme

 

The mission of FIG Commission 7 is to:

 

• Provide a forum for enhancing and exchanging knowledge about cadastre, land administration and land management world wide

• Encourage the development of pro poor land management and land administration

• Promote the importance of development of sustainable land administration as infra-structure for sustainable development to
  underpin economic growth

• Promote the application of innovative and advanced technology in cadastre and land administration

• Promote awareness of the role of surveyors in land administration matters to the public and among stakeholders.

 

Crowdsourcing uses the Internet and on-line tools to get work done by obtaining input and stimulating action from citizen volunteers. It is currently used to support scientific evidence gathering and record events in disaster management, as witnessed in the recent Haiti and Libya crises, for example. However, new applications are emerging in the land administration domain where citizens, usually with help from trusted intermediaries, are directly capturing and maintaining information about their land and natural resource rights.

 

Mobile phones are becoming pervasive and in less developed countries have become a global development tool. The technology is progressively integrating GNSS positioning, microphones, digital cameras and video capabilities. This facility provides citizens with the opportunity to directly participate in the full range of land administration processes from accessing land information services, recording property boundaries through to secure payment of land administration fees using ‘mobile’ banking.

 

Examples of emerging solutions include: the USAID Mobile Applications to Secure Tenure (MAST) project in Tanzania where USAID is working with the Ministry of Lands to issue Certificates of Customary Right of Occupancy; Rainforest Foundation UK is supporting indigenous forest people in the Congo and Cameroon, for example, to secure their land and natural resource rights and involve them in overall forest governance arrangements; the FAO SOLA Team have recently developed ‘Open Tenure’ to address the need of people in many countries to have their tenure rights recognised at a community level through the use of mobile devices and crowdsourcing techniques; Esri are working with Dutch Kadaster in Columbia to capture land rights with mobile technology; and Cadasta is implementing a global platform to manage crowdsourced land rights information.

 

The focus of this workshop will be to bring the developers and early adopters of crowdsourcing of land rights into a forum to share their approaches and experiences and build good practice in this embryonic and exciting approach to land administration.

 

Commission 7 Topics

 

Topics will include, but are not limited to:

 

• Mobile technology to support the recording of evidence of land rights.

• Experience and case studies of working with citizens to crowdsource evidence of land rights.

• Citizens’ reactions to perceived benefits of crowdsourced land and natural resource rights.

• Use of LADM / STDM in this application.

• Approaches to authenticating crowdsourced evidence of land rights.

• Experiences in using trusted intermediaries / para-surveyors to support citizens in recording evidence of land rights and
  approaches to scaling-up operations.

• Managing access and privacy around the sensitivity of land and natural resource rights information.

• Experience in formalising crowdsourced land rights with Land Registration and Cadastral Agencies.

• Global platforms to manage and provide access to the crowdsourced evidence of land rights.