 Hello, everybody. My name is Neil Sorensen. I'm a communication specialist with the Landportal Foundation, and today I'm here with Augustina DeLuca, the Network Director of the Open Data Charter. Augustina has a long history of working for open governance. She has, she worked almost for eight years at Directoria Legislativa and Argentinian CSO that promotes legislative openness in Latin America. And she has specialized experience in issues of open government, transparency, and accountability, and has led national and regional advocacy projects and events. Well, transparency here, the Landportal and the Open Data Charter are working together to develop an open up guide on land governance, providing a use case driven framework of priority land related data to make available and for supporting governments to commit to context appropriate steps and increase accessibility and use of land information. Thank you for being with us today, Augustina. Yeah, we wanted to get a better understanding of the Open Data Charter and your work on corruption. And could you tell us a little bit about your work? Sure. So we are a global organization that works with data practitioners and governments that promote and that try to open up data while protecting fundamental rights. So we work, we have a network of 100, over 150 governments and organizations, and we work on some issues in particular and on data governance as a whole. My role is to support this global network and to create resources, insights and connect governments among each other to share challenges, activities, ideas, and success stories. In particular we have been working on three areas on climate change on gender equity and on anti-corruption and in each of them we promote the open specific data sets that should be made open by governments for making an open policy on those areas. And in the anti-corruption work with many governments, the issue of land tenure and land rights was identified as crucial for a good anti-corruption policy. So based on that we have engaged with the land portal here to develop an open up guide on land governance to try to work with governments to open up data on how they are administering their own land policies that can then inform better decision making. Oh, thank you. Thank you for that response. Let's see. You know, what do you think are the implications of land corruption in governance? Do you have any personal ideas and experiences that you could share with us today? What have you seen in the initiatives and projects that you've worked on? So at the first time we've seen that it's not an area where many governments have information published, which is a challenge. We've seen a lot of information around budget, around public acquisitions, around employment, around salaries, around either extractives at some point, but not about land tenure, land rights, land use, land development information. And that is crucial because not only to know who owns what, but also where we have protective areas where we can't allow to construct or that we have to have special treatment for them, where we have environmental issues that we have to protect that area, about taxation, about exemptions around permissions for building in the cities, around planning, around expropriation activities. So all these make of a good, make and are clearly related between public private positions. In all of these we have private companies that are involved in their own businesses that might be in touch with each. And we have the public sector that should make policies and should make sure that the regulations and the activities in place are secured. So having information of all these might help citizens monitor, might help journalism create stories and narratives and inform the public on how the policies are being implemented. And at the end, it actually, it's about letting people know how the government is implementing and allocating its budgets and how they are protecting ourselves based on the regulations in place. Why do you think land corruption is so prevalent? I mean, you know, we hear that it's one of the besides police departments that it's the most common form of corruption that exists. So why is this the case? Do you have any insights on why this is and how this opening up guide is going to contribute to addressing this very serious problem? Well, I think that land corruption is it's clearly related to our everyday lives. It's about my neighbor who owns each land or in my city in particular. I mean, it might be indirectly affects me. So that's why maybe some citizens directly associated or don't trust some particular institutions are more directly related to our everyday lives. But it definitely affects urban or rural planning and its effects on how, I mean, disproportionately affects the most vulnerable groups or those that have less resources to mobilize, to monitor, to advocate, or to communicate. Those that have the most work, the women, those vulnerable groups and marginalized groups are disproportionately affected by bad land governance administration. So we believe that working with governments and having these resources that we're going to be named, that's going to be named around an open up guide on land governance. We believe that by working with governments in trying to address the particular problems and challenges from that region and by opening up data on how they are managing their own land administration, then it will help those the citizens from that region have more information to monitor how government is making decisions. But it will also help governments in itself to have better information, more timely one. And because in the process of opening up data, then you also work on your internal data governance framework. And so for sure, in the process of implementing the guide, you also improve your internal data infrastructure. So by that then governments will have more information and more data, disaggregated data can be used to inform their decision making process. But we have to, in the process of testing this guide, we work with the local community, not only with governments, but with data users with journalists and organizations with communities, interested people to discuss what are the local priorities, what's the local context, what are the key objectives, what is the data that those data users are demanding and work together, governments and the local community on opening up that information because then it will be clearly and directly used for the purposes that those people were asking for. So we believe that building these community of practice of non government and organizations, private companies, journalists, and governments, and those that are directly affected by a bad land governance administration, then it will improve the, the policy as a whole. Thank you Augustina, very insightful. Do you have any sense of a particular governments that are right for targeting or that, you know, might be open to this kind of this kind of kind of guide. We try to, when we implement the guides, we have a similar approach we try to identify governments that are willing to open up data because at the end, this is of course, a project to open up information on that governance. So we identify those that have already a data framework in place at some point, either if they have land data open or not but some point of achieve that officer or some kind of data infrastructure in place. And then of course that they have the political will to open up data on land information. So based on that, then we work with them from. We don't have a particular region of interest. It's more about the interest from the government and where we have a where there exists a local community that's interested in land administration and land data to inform that their own projects or, or monitoring activities. And with, after we engage with the government then we work with the local community as I was saying before, to identify the local context, the local challenges and the key objectives of opening up that the recommended data sets because the guide recommends a bulk of data sets and of course, we have to prioritize with the government and with the local community which are the most crucial for that context. So based on that first, we'll make a workshop and based on that first interaction, then we work directly with the government in opening up those crucial data sets that were prioritized together. Okay, that's very interesting information. Do you have any other things you'd like to add on how this work on opening up land governance information will contribute to reducing land corruption. So first, to fight corruption as a whole, we need information, we need to know how decisions, or are being made to identify capacity gaps to identify potential areas of corruption. Now, we don't have that much information globally and how land is administered. And so that opens up gaps for, for, for misuse of funds, or for just don't knowing how decisions are being made, which permits obscure and illegal practices. So by opening up this information, it will increase people's knowledge on how governments are administering their land information, and it will for sure improve the administration of that policy. So I mean transparency is that means to an end. I think it's generally the answer to fight corruption and to improve policymaking. And that actually brings more build trust with the local community and that can, at the end, we have, as we were saying before, more equitable outcomes, because if we have information and we involve the community at the beginning, then at the end, at the end of the process, we will have a better democracy and a better governance framework that can bring the people at the center of decision making process. Bringing people at the center of the decision making process that sounds like a good outcome. Just one last question. Do you have a book or a podcast or a movie that you could recommend to our listeners, viewers to learn more about these issues. So I've been listening to a Latin American podcast, which is it's organized by an Argentinian organization and they make interviews to specialize people on anti corruption, either from the transnational point of view from the journalism from the theoretical and philosophical point of view and it's really interesting. It's called break the wheel. And in Spanish is Romero La Rueda. I can share that later. It's really inspiring. I really like kind of the format. It's not that common. I'm from Argentina and it's not that common in Latin America to have inspiring podcasts in Spanish around this, this topic. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that we'll be sure to share it as well when we publish this interview. All right, thank you so much for your time Augustina and thanks for sharing your perspective we really appreciate it. Well, thanks to you for the hard work and for for this interview with hope. It's just the beginning of a global conversation and that actually improves the availability of Latin governments information.