 Good morning, everyone. Good afternoon. I hope you are well wherever you are. And I want to thank you for joining us here today. But before I introduce myself, I'd like to let you know that we have interpretation in Bahasa, in French and into Spanish. So please make sure that you click on the globe icon at the bottom of your zoom window. And select the language that you would like to listen to. So if you're interested in listening in Spanish, select Spanish. So please take a few seconds and make sure that you're in the right language. My name is Charlton Bayer. I'm the land information management and advocacy consultant at the land portal foundation. And I want to welcome you all to this webinar on empowering civil society and communities through open land data. I'd also like everybody to take an opportunity to introduce themselves in the chat piece. So feel free to do that and let us know who you are and where you're from. I'd also like to thank both ends who we are partnering with here and we're very happy to be collaborating with them. And this is the first webinar of a series that we are planning is called whose land inclusive pathways to land governance. And the series of webinars aim to provide a platform for stakeholders engaged in land governance. We would like to exchange on the importance of inclusivity and meaningful participation for all relevant stakeholders and actors in the formal and informal land governance processes. We are planning some more webinars and we will be having at least two more webinars after the summer. But for today, we want to focus on the opportunities and constraints of civil society organizations and local communities in terms of how they can go about advocating for more open land data and how they can harness the power of open land data to improve land governance. We want to look at how CSOs can better advocate for outcomes in terms of services related to land administration and governance, how to promote transparency, accountability, informed public debate, and also tackle issues of corruption. But there are some legitimate concerns that have been raised around issues of privacy, equity, trust, and how first movers use and can monopolize data. So the question in front of us really is who benefits from land data being open and how can participation in equity for local communities and citizens be insured. We will also address issues of indigenous data sovereignty and this is a key open data issue and speaks to the rights of indigenous people to control information and data about themselves and the lands both individually and collectively. And I think it relates to broader issues of power and power relations that speak both to pre and post colonial power dynamics, and we look forward to having an interesting discussion with our panelists on these issues. And I would like to invite the audience, if you have any questions, please feel free to put them in the chat and we will collect these questions during the dialogue and pose them during our Q&A feature at the end of our workshop in the last half an hour. On a logistical note, I would like to let you know that the webinar is being live streamed on a number of platforms and it's also being recorded and we will make the key messages available on the NAND portal website. We are starting to have participants, I think when I last looked, we had more than 500 participants already. So that's really an excellent turnout for this webinar. Please note that live tweeting is occurring from this event and from the NAND portal account and we are using the whose land hashtag. So if you have any questions, please use them and also look at the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen and we will look at that at the end of the day. But before we start, before I introduce the panel, I would like to ask you a question about open data for which you need to log into the website. I would like to ask you a question and Neil would like to see the Mentimeter. So please go to, we put together a word cloud. So please go to mentimeter.com and I think it is going to be posted in the chat. And you can use a phone or you can use your computer and enter the code 17302237. I think Neil has put the link in the chat and you can click on that as well. And please provide one or two words that come to mind when you think of open data. So not a long sentence, just a word that comes to mind when you think of open data. We'll give you a bit of time so you can get into the website and enter the code and we will see how the terms that people associate with open data pop up in the screen. It's growing a little bit so I'll just like ask everybody to make sure they go to Mentimeter.com and put in the code 17302237. So we are starting to see some words popping up. We are seeing free. We're seeing transparency. And there's also an issue around transparency is really coming up more accessible is coming up e-government. I thought I saw boring somewhere but there's also an issue of risk accountability. It's still growing a little bit. Transparency is still staying in the lead as the most important word. And so please feel free to continue adding words into the Mentimeter. I think what we see from the immediate association are issues around transparency accessibility and empowerment. And I think all of these are quite important and we will keep a hold of this and also share that afterwards. I think this is interesting because it gives us a perspective of what open data is and how people perceive open data to be. So I think I'm going to ask that we while that is going on we can introduce our speakers. The first week I'd like to introduce is Fernando Castro Suarez. He's an indigenous Nibbodi market leader and national coordinator for the safeguard program for the people of the Colombian Amazon. We're also honored to have Juan Paine who is the director of research and development of the Center for Sustainable Development in Paraguay. And then we have Manara Royal Mama Ken. She's a lecturer on that administration at the University of Namibia and has worked with civil society for the last eight years on technical support to communities in urban informal settlements focusing on data collection for improved security. And finally we have Christian Taku who is the coordinator of the Community Assistance in Development Commit Program based in Cameroon and is involved in pro-poor land governance initiatives including participatory mapping. So I think we have quite an esteemed panel and they will all have a chance later on to just introduce themselves and to give us their opinions on this important topic. At first I would like to ask you to complete a poll for us. It's important that we do this poll up front because we want to gauge your understanding of open data. So Neil is going to share the poll and what we're going to do is if you enter one it means you have no understanding of open data. If you enter a five it means that you feel that you have an excellent understanding of open data and you will be able to see the poll on your screen as well. So we will wait for the responses to come in and so please feel free to select a number on the poll. Of course the hosts and the panelists are not able to vote. So we'll wait a little bit for results to come in. The results have started coming in. I don't know if you can see it on your screen but it seems that most of us are falling on the sort of average 33% of you have said that you have an intermediate understanding of open data. So number three is so far the highest scoring number and only about 6% of you are saying you have no understanding and 5% of you are saying you have an excellent understanding. So everybody seems to be in the sort of range of understanding. So please continue going with the poll. We will be running the poll again at the end of the seminar so please continue with that. I think these results are very interesting in terms of where puts the audience also in terms of open data. So if we reflect on the topic of discussion for today which is really about empowering civil society and communities to open data. I think we need to reflect on two things. What constitutes open data and how can communities and CSOs empower themselves. So we have a number of great panelists that are going to speak about CSOs and communities. So I would like to just maybe start by saying that public data firstly is not open data. And this is something that we have seen when we talk about open data and I think I can relate it to the word transparency that came up. It is a key part of open data but just being public doesn't actually make it open data. Open data needs to be digital data that is available with a technical and legal characteristics necessary for it to be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone anytime. That means it must be opened by default. The setting should not be that you request permission to access data but that it is open by default. It means that if data is not made available that position is the one that needs to be justified. It needs to be timely and comprehensive and otherwise the data is not that useful. It gets less useful the older it gets in most cases. So it needs to be timely and comprehensive. It needs to be accessible, discoverable and usable. There's no use for open data if it cannot be accessed then it's not fully open. And this means it must be machine readable at the highest level of openness. And finally we want data that is comparable and interoperable. That allows us to harness the power of true open data so that we can really have data that you can download and that you can use and combine with other data sets. But I think this is enough from my side. I think we want to hear from our panelists. So let me ask our first panelist Juan to get a better sense of open data and local communities. Why is open data, why is data and open data an important issue that communities including even grassroots communities need to consider or need to be aware of? With that I'll hand over to you Juan. Thank you. Thank you for having me. This is Juan from Paraguay. You're saying I'm the most research director here at the Center for Sustainable Development, but I also work at the University of Massachusetts. I'm a researcher there also. So I've been working with open data for around 20 years now. I know I look young, but I'm not that young. Okay. It depends on what you mean by grassroots communities, right? And there are different purposes. I mean, open data normally serves different purposes for different audiences and grassroots communities being one of them. And when we talk about grassroots communities, at least the way that I think about them is a movement or a set of people that live in a given place, let's say so. It's not some common purpose and they want to work together to achieve that purpose, right? Be that land rights or any other need that they have or right that they feel that are being wrong, right? And grassroots communities are normally also associated with people with a lot of needs like people in the slums and indigenous people. The thing that we need to understand about these type of particular grassroots communities are that they have many, many rights being wrong and normally like food security, education, land being one of them also. And it's hard for them to concentrate on more advanced rights like land rights as opposed to education or food, right, nutrition rights. And they normally do not understand what the needs are or they even do not even know that they have those rights or that they don't even know what open data is, right, in order to know what to do with them. When this happens what it normally have seen in the past is that there are different other stakeholders that help them in achieving their rights like CSOs and GOs and other types of stakeholders, like the one that we think normally that are supposed to be doing that is the government, right, normally. But given these lack of intervention or efficiency or efficacy in the government in actually helping them to achieve their rights and you have other actors or other stakeholders in place. And it's actually interesting because when you have these dynamic you have different types of actors trying to help people in grassroots communities or in other types of communities also with needs. And you need to be able to put them together to have them talk together, which is normally not very easy because they have different objectives in general, right. The ones that won their land rights is just that and the one CSOs have their own agendas, government have their own agendas, academia have their own agendas. So it is important that we recognize that first because we need to give them the proper tools, the proper data, the proper incentives to actually have them talk together first, because it is normally a mistake to think that they all want the same thing, because it's not like that. I mean the real world is not like that. We all have our own agendas. But when you actually realize that there are some common grounds that you can make the conversation go around. And at the end where all people that we want to live better, right and an open data is a tool, as I always say in my in my courses and in my it's not an end on itself is a tool that you can use to build something on top of that right. It's like a hammer, you can you can use a hammer to build a house but you can also do use the hammer to do a lot of damage, right. And open data is just like that and and I always say and I like the characteristics that you were saying about open data and and I also refer to a metaphor and that is like, when you're giving a task of for instance, building an Olympic swimming pool, you can be given a spoon, you can do the task, it will take you a lot of time, or you can be given a Bobcat tractor right, which will help you to do it very fast. And publicly available data is like the spoon right, you can use it to do it, you could potentially it will take you forever, but if you actually have open data with all the characteristics that you were mentioning, you can do it and faster right and it's super important to have that in order to actually allow us to achieve our goals in general. And well, for instance, in government, they want to integrate information from from different government agencies to better create evidence based decision system for academia normally they have their own agenda on on accessing quality data for research, in order to advance science and knowledge, and I can go on and on about how different actors have different agendas but what we need to know is that the best project normally that I've come across in all these 20 years of working with open data happens when you put together different stakeholders and normally in my experience these stakeholders take these, these are five five type of stakeholders, the people that actually have the needs, right. And in those people you normally need to find champions right the ones who actually want to fight to achieve their liking needs. Those who have the data, right, those who have the capacity to analyze the data because normally those who have the data to not always have the capacity to analyze the data. There are resources to actually put together a project and push this type of projects, and those who can actually make a decision an informed decision and who are willing to make the change for better. Right and this normally come from government right and willingness here is is is a big, big, big issue. Right, because normally you can find champions everywhere you can find people who can analyze data everywhere in academia, you can have, you can find people that have the needs everywhere also, but having the willingness to actually put together all these type of people and actually make an informed decision and change in my experience is the most hard part of any of the open data projects that I've been working on. So I don't know if I've actually answered your question but I think that those are important ingredients and things that would work with open data. I think the important part I'm just going to reflect quickly on three, three issues amongst the many that you raised. And I think the first one and I think we'll come back to this late in the conversation is the diversity of grassroots communities. I mean, there's not sort of a uniform or blanket description. The second one relates to data as a tool. In other words, given the diversity of these organizations, we need to recognize that open data is the means to an end. It's not the end in itself. And that is determined also by what the needs of these diverse communities are. And then the last point is the agency and the capacity. So what agency, what capacity do these communities have to use data to advocate for themselves or to articulate their needs and understand their needs? I think these are three sort of key highlights that I would just like to reflect on, but I'm going to give some of the panelists a chance to reflect on that again a little bit later. But let me turn to Hernando and find out about how they are using data and how important data is for your work, Hernando, and what forms of data do you use? So over to you, Hernando. Good morning, Hernando. Good morning. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. We can hear you loud here. Please repeat the question, Tommy. I wanted to ask from Hernando how they are using data and how important data is for their work. What are the forms of data that you use or the types of data that you use? Neil, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Okay. Good morning to all of you who are listening to me. I think the presentation is not very good, right? Yes, Hernando can continue. You mean like a presentation, we don't have a PowerPoint presentation. No, no, no, I don't have it. Yeah, he can just continue. I can hear you in English and I can follow the discussion. It's no problem. Ah, okay. You have a text, right? No. Based on, let's say, this is very grateful to the people in the center and especially my people from the Colombian Amazon. So the importance that data has for my work and the forms of data that are used. I mean, for my people, I mean, in the Colombian Amazon, the information and knowledge of our own is essential for the effective voice of our rights to possess, manage, manage, and control our green territory. That's what I'm going to say. We are using this work that cannot be grouped into our work in local communities, because I think the local communities have another way of understanding and our work as indigenous peoples is totally different. This is good that we are doing it. And we call it the work that we are doing. It's called Naguimas, traditional territories. We are using traditional knowledge, technological knowledge, or self-determination of our own in our territorial ancestral jurisdiction. And in terms of the recollection and recollection of the information that we possess and occupy, our territory is to defend our land and our forests. On the part of intervention of indigenous peoples that the government has to do, and the State has had the interest to continue to do commercialization, including carbon trade companies, that make up our rights of each people and their land. There is more in front of the agricultural corridor. We see that it is not clear, let's say, until now, the development that the State has in front of the territories that we possess as millenial owners. And it is important to give solutions according to the principles of the reality that we have. The solution based on nature for us is not the reality, since that is a great deception that is taken from the extractive industrialization that each time the State promotes and deteriorates our forests. We need more solid data that defines the reality and the understanding of other forms of work that we have in our people in each of our territories, especially in the Colombian Amazon. It is also important where we get the data, the data that we have, these are data that we have reached, geographically in the spaces that we have. Can we come back to the question of the source of the data? Because that is actually a question that I want to ask and get a bit more detail on. But we only have three minutes for this round of questions. So asking if we can keep that question for the next round, please. Thank you. Thank you. I think there's this two interesting observations, actually three interesting observations that I can make from Hernandez's contribution. The first is around this combination of indigenous knowledge, which was documented by new technologies, really geared towards using data to protect indigenous resources, to protect land rights, to protect their land from interventions from the extractive industries. And there's also a conceptual question that only needs more attention and needs to be asked. And that's also the very notion of what constitutes data, what constitutes indigenous knowledge, information about resources, about plants, about the medicinal use of plants. So I think there's a couple of very interesting issues that come up here. And I want to explore this idea of the data and the sources of the data and where that comes from. Before we go there, I want to ask Christian, and I want to thank Anando again for this very important perspective on data and actually the question of the meaning of data. And I want to ask Christian, what are the constraints that as an organization and as a civil society organization, what are the constraints that local communities face in accessing data, in accessing data that they trust? Because I think Anando also made a point about the source of data. They need solid data that they can trust to protect their interests. So what are the issues that communities face in accessing data, land data that they think can cement or protect their interests? Thank you, Tom, and to queue up from where the others, because I think they have said a lot of interesting things. And I am talking on the standpoint of a civil society. The work that we do, we require accurate data to be able to use it for our lobby and advocate campaigns. And what we will notice is that in most of Africa, the countries in Africa still have less than 30% of land recordation. In my own country, Cameroon, we have less than 15% of land recordation. This means that more than 80% of the lands are not documented. So it's a fundamental limitation to having digital data on land that we can use. And as I say, if we need to access data, open data, or data that is free, we still have a problem because even in the limited data that has been documented, it is still the central administration, the Department of Lands that generate, that manage the data. So we will have limited access to those data. And as we say, when you look at local communities and you look at what is happening, local communities are actually living in the area that we call national land. For example, in our country, that is a state that has demanded to manage those lands. And all the large scale land acquisitions are happening in those areas. And from every time you see local communities being dispossessed, being evicted from the ancestral land and that is a concern. Even in Cameroon, we have a law on transparency which was ratified in July 2018, which says that all large scale land acquisitions, all investors, all contracts, all projects are needed to be made open so that people can access for accountability and transparency. But that is a big limitation because we still do not have access to that. And when you look at all of these, we also see issues of interest and corruption that is acting because the playground is not level. When it comes to accessing data on land, you always see that the local communities, they are usually marginalized. The consent of local people generally are not sick and they really do not play a frontline role when they come to large scale land acquisition, generating the data and making it public. And we also realize that the civil society organizations, they also lack some capacity to be able to access. We have open data sources like the land metrics, like the open land contracts, we have the land decks, we have open street maps. Not all of the civil society organizations have the capacity to be able to download the data from these sources and use it. Downloading it is another thing and using it is another thing. So we have the challenge in most of the work that we do. Sometimes we try to get data and the data that we go and find, we see that it still has limitation. We cannot answer the concerns that we have on the field. So I think that is broadly, that is actually the issue. You see that we know that it is the government that creates the public data, but for data to also become open, it has to be created, it has to be validated, and it has to be put in the repository where everybody can access it and use it. So we have all of these challenges on the standpoint of the civil society. Thank you. Thank you, Christian. I think you've emphasized in a way, quite an important point that I think one of the commentators in the chat picked up as well on the distinction between the needs of local communities and versus the needs of indigenous communities and that these two sets of needs are not necessarily the same. And I think it reflects also the broader point that was raised earlier that even for grassroots communities or using a term like grassroots communities, they also have different needs depending on the land and the resources and the issues that affect them. And I think this diversity of needs between indigenous communities, between local communities is an important point that needs to be reflected. And I think speaks to a degree of nuance that must always be taken into account when we speak about open data. And I want to reflect on I think the very first speaker making the point about open data not being the goal, not being the means to an end, but actually, well, it is the means to an end. It's how we can do something in order to achieve the needs as defined by communities, as defined by people for themselves. And I think this speaks to this issue of the power relationships, the agency that people have or that they think they have when it comes to data decisions, decisions that are being made without their consent and without their participation. And I think that is an important issue that the open data community really still needs to grapple with and better understand how to incorporate, accommodate, and seek that kind of partnership that is really needed in order to deliver on the expectations of a variety of communities. So I want to bring in Roy who has worked with communities and asked her about an example, experiences where communities have used data to improve the situation and how did that happen? What did that look like? So welcome, Roy. Okay, thank you, Tommy. And I'm very happy to be here. I think we're having quite a very important discussion and there are some lessons that we can take from Namibia that we can use to integrate within our processes of moving from just not collecting data, but moving towards collecting and creating data that is open to the public. So the example that I have with a community that have generated their own data is the Shagdweller's Federation of Namibia. They are affiliated to Slamdweller's International. They have been collecting data I think for over 30 years now on their own community, detailing their own situation. So in 2009, the Shagdweller's Federation collected or profiled around all informal settlements in Namibia in every region, where they identified over 208 informal settlements I think by that time, and then managed to collect profiles on the tenure status of all the residents, the availability of services within those settlements and then also understanding the development priorities. So around 2012, they started doing an in-depth data collection on individual households within certain urban areas. And we have one classic example. It's a case study that many researchers are interested on around the power of communities and data. And that is the one in Hobarbis, in Hobarbis, which is in the Maheke region. The community collected data on each and every structure in the informal settlement detailing what are the development priorities? What is the affordability of the residents towards paying for services and then also in the instance if the settlement has to develop, what is it that the communities can contribute towards that development? Following that from 2012 to 2016, the community went through a process of collecting the data, having the data used as a tool, as Juan mentioned, to discuss with the local authority what their development priorities are. Because the first point was that the local authority wanted to relocate the entire settlement somewhere else because the land where they were located was seen as prime land for housing construction that the local authority wanted to develop and then later on sell to the public. So with the data that the community collected, they were able to convince the local government, which is the local authority, the Hobarbis municipality, to not evict the community but to go into a discussion around what they can do to develop. So around 2016, as I mentioned earlier, we started a participatory planning process, taking the data that was collected, understanding what is the development priority. Normally what we see in land administration or land management type of discussion is that local authorities would always think that communities want water as a first priority to development or electricity or they would want, say, is it water, electricity or toilets, for example. But what we have seen from the community that collected their own data is that the level of tenure was important. They wanted to have rights to the land. They wanted to develop the land themselves as well. And they were willing to bring about finding things to develop that land. So in 2016-17, they started a participatory planning process. They co-designed a settlement layout with the community, the local authorities. The Namibia University of Science and Technology was on board through our department of town planning in that time to plan together with the community. And they managed to find a solution, which was tenure was a problem. Communities managed through the data collection bringing other stakeholders that could bring in financing or technical assistance to assist them. And as we speak, we have a community of 1,000 households that are able to construct and develop their own houses in an area that was initially identified as an area where residents had to be evicted. And for me, I see this that the data was an important element because most of the time when we have issues around tenure insecurity or housing, you have different voices coming from different corners in communities or just in the general public arena. What we saw with this is that the community had data that they could present to stakeholders and say, we are here in this area. We want to develop. And even though we don't have, let's say, the necessary findings at a specific level to buy the land, we are willing to contribute to equity. We are willing to work with local government in order for the land to be secured. So I think that's an example that we're working on. Before we move on a little bit, some of the translators are struggling to follow. So if you could just slow down a little bit. Oh, okay. Thank you. No, sorry. Sometimes when I get passionate about these things, I tend to speak very fast, but getting back. So what we observed is that the data wasn't important to start a discussion with the local authority to prevent the eviction that was planned. It was important to inform the local government about the capacity of the community to contribute to their own development. And what we are working on right now through a partnership with the Namibia Housing Action Group, which is the supporting NGO to the Shek Dulles Federation, is to start a project around opening up the data that the communities are collecting and putting it available in the public domain. Because the data that communities collect is stored in the local office. If you want the data, you can approach the office and request the data, but it's not easily available. We have started a project with OpenStreetMap on making data from informal settlement communities available on the platform that shows where are the levels of services in the community, what is the level of access in terms of roads in that settlement as well. And we will be populating this for the next two years through a new project that we recently started. Yeah, so I do apologize for being a bit too fast on the initial discussion, but I'll be here for a while to just share a bit more if there are any questions. Yeah, thank you, Tony. Thank you, Roy. I mean, I think there's also a discussion happening in the chat and this is an example that reflects actually how a particular community, the Shek Dulles Federation of Namibia, could use data and data that they're essentially collected themselves through community enumeration program to secure their land rights. So I think this is a very good example now. It's a very specific example. So thanks for sharing this experience, but let me ask you so that we can generalize that discussion about the Shek Dulles Federation and the Shek Dulles Federation of Namibia, collecting data, the CLIP program, as you mentioned, enumerating that and using that data, not only to secure their land rights, but actually to articulate the needs that they have, the services that they require. What are the lessons, if anything, that we can learn from this example, that we can learn from this process that is more broadly applicable? All right. Okay. Thank you for me. I will speak slow now. One of the major lessons that we've got, and we are still learning, one of them stood out is that communities firstly have capacity to collect their own data, so they should not just be seen as beneficiaries of development. What I mean by this is that we have institutions, universities and researchers that think that data that is collected by communities is out of quality, it doesn't have a specific standard, maybe because the sampling method that was used is not appropriate or whatnot. What we learn from this process is that communities have capacity. They also have a willingness to engage with local government, the national government on what their development priorities are. The second lesson was also that data is essential in guiding discussions for development. What we see, and I think it was also hinted by the first speaker on the indigenous community, is that the priorities of government or the priorities of development agencies around development are normally different and can be different compared to the needs of the communities themselves. So what we have identified through this process is that communities have different priorities to those that the national government has. If government, for example, wants to improve the level of sanitation or improve sanitation in a country, they will develop a project on making toilets available. But sometimes communities don't necessarily want this toilet. They want security of their land rights, the land where they are occupying or they want limited interventions from government or they don't want communal toilets. They want individual toilets and they are willing to pick some finding thing available for them. So we see that this for us was a major lesson. And then lastly, and I also want to link this to something that Juan mentioned in terms of data being a tool, is that the data that we collected was able to speed up the development process for communities. Because if we were going to focus on having, let's say, a reputable research institution coming to collect the data on an informal settlement community, having them analyze the data and see what the priorities are and present that, that was going to take a bit more time. So when we engaged communities themselves, when they collected this data about their own situation, we saw that this process was happened much faster compared to other communities where this was not done. We had four settlements that we worked with. The ones that pushed for the data collection, that analyzed and presented the data to themselves, amongst themselves and also to stakeholders, was able to move from being or having a high level of tenure insecurity to finally being issued landhold titles through a project that has been spearheaded by the Ministry of Agriculture, what I've learned before. So Tommy, those are just the three major lessons. Firstly, communities have capacity. Data is essential in guiding discussion on development priorities. And then lastly, data as a tool can also sort of speed up project implementation and also sort of enhance that ownership that communities need to have when there are any interventions in the areas. Thank you, Royal. I think there's no need for me to summarize what you've said because you actually did that for me in the last so I saw one nodding a couple of times as well. So let me turn my attention to him in terms of, you know, your experiences with regards to data, both negative or positive. And what are the fears that you have about, you know, ownership or proprietary ownership or protection or misappropriation? Yeah, no, I was feeling so related when Royal was speaking. So many of the things that she was saying is like, I'm not alone in this world. We are also facing the same things here, by the way, in the other side of the world later. So yeah, this is just to mention something that I was speaking and this is actually what cross learning should look like and I'm going to applaud these initiatives. Going back to your question. Well, I mean, negative and positive. I think one of the things that I mentioned before in the most positive or negative experiences that I have is positive when you have these ingredients that I was mentioning before and they actually work together. What do I mean by ingredients? So first of all, they need for change. There is a real problem being addressed because I've seen many open data initiatives work on problems that don't actually exist. This is what I mean when I was saying like, data is not an end on itself. And many of the problems on the open data community focus on the data, not on the problems that are there to be solved by data, right? Those are like problems created on the data because of the way that data was conceived, not because of what are the data good for, what are the problems that can help data solve, right? And I really like the fact that we were talking about the fact that we need to articulate these, right? We need to understand the differences between, for instance, what we were saying and I've seen in the chat between the local communities and indigenous communities. The worst experiences that I've seen in open data projects are the ones that do not actually understand the difference and that bring like prefixed formulas that actually work somewhere else in the world. I come from a developing country and normally these prefixed formulas come from developed countries or anywhere else in the world that do not basically pause and check the context, right? You always need to check the context in order to understand whether all the things that you are assuming or supposing that are there in the local community and the needs are actually there. And just as an example, as I was saying, like just understanding the difference between local communities and indigenous communities is one of them. The other element is the willingness to change. So when you have the need for a change but you don't have the willingness for change, then basically you... I mean, you will do a lot of work without any actual change because there's no willingness to change. Not only willingness to change, it willingness to engage and collaborate with each other. Normally one key ingredient is that you also need a champion. In all the projects that I found actually working is there is a champion or a set of people that really makes this project his passion or her passion, right? And when you find this person, it's really interesting because this person acts as a pivot to all other ingredients and it's very good, right? You also need the experts, the people that actually can do the research, that actually understand the problem, that can propose the solution, that can understand the data and propose different pathways and then select one example or test different alternatives and pick the best one. You, of course, need the data and the tools, right? We were saying that data itself is a tool and you can have the need for a change. You can have the willingness. You can have the champion. You can have the experts. You can even have the data, but if you don't have the collaboration, basically you will have a very bad experience, very unsatisfied and satisfying experience. So I think that if you have those six kind of ingredients that I was telling you about in a certain degree, the more of them that you have, the more satisfying experience you will have and the less you have of them, the less satisfying experience you will have. Just an example. So we were tackling a problem here on inundation. So the river level was growing for like five or six meters. So everything was flooded and the flooding was very severe and we didn't know where to put people or what were the people in the slums living in the river base supposed to go, right? So we put together a lot of research and we used later data from NASA to check what was a part of the land that was going to be covered by water and who were the people that were going to be displaced and based on that we collaborated and created a system that will allow us to check and replace the settlements for proper settlements and to actually compute the capacity of the settlements based on how much land it would be flooded and how much people would be displaced. Misappropriation normally happens and this is something that I always tell them super important to understand. Transparency in open data is a political coin, right? And one of the misappropriations that I really hate the most is the one that I normally call open washing, which basically is. So politicians coming to you saying, I want this transparency and open data tool or whatever and not actually having the willingness that I was mentioning before to actually do any change and they only do it because they want both or they want to maintain their political power. There are other types of misappropriation like data misappropriation or appropriation in general because what normally happens this is probably everywhere in the world public officials manage the data and they tend to think that the data is their own not like from the public. And this also happens with every CSO that also produces local data. It's really hard to convince them to open up their data to actually achieve more collaboration. But I'm going to stop here. Yeah, go ahead. Let's stop at that point because you're talking about the collection of data at the local level and I want to jump to Hernando and come back partly to an issue that he raised at the end of his first statement. And I want to hear more about these issues from Hernando in terms of where they source their data how they collected or do they have other sources? What is the sort of data exchange and the data acquisition process? So thank you Hernando. I want to ask you about that. The data that we have are the millenials that we have as a people of the land that is the history of knowledge that has been generated for thousands of years and we have been perfecting it. And in coherence with the geographical statistics of traditional space in which the knowledge of our people has it. And especially the thinkers and the knowledge of us that still reposes it and it's not written anywhere else. They only have it in their memory. And what we do is through the language of several people what we do is to talk to the older people and transcribe that statistics of each geographical environment so that this information is much more reliable because the state has many errors. The names don't match, the spaces are much more displaced and prior to that we make some internal agreements between the people and between the same people to determine those data what would be the purpose of being used to the future because as there is partial information scientific information and spiritual information then there are several levels of data of information that we collect. We have also had initiatives of our own determination with the support of people of external office in the case of us of Nupodumac the office of the Columbia Club and an assistance provided by the foundation of Código Postal Sueco we also have other external support but the information that we have administered here in Colombia in the case of the geographical institute Augustin Codaspi it doesn't give the real information of the people and they oppress us. That's why this information is directly from the principles of our own law of origin it's an initiative that we are demonstrating to the state and other parts of the world let's say how we are going to improve how we can better understand let's say the delimitations in the case of us as indigenous peoples today with the intention to function as an entity of territoriality and that should have a reliable information since in great part of the information our elders have never transmitted it because of fear that it can be used for other purposes but in this opportunity we have with these supports to start doing these work at the level of of our own reality and to limit our own territory and to say look state this is our territory and everyone who comes in the framework of the free termination we can coordinate actions and also we have to understand that this information is property of the people it's collective property it's not individual because many times this information becomes individual but not collective what we have is collective of sovereign property of the people we can only use it whenever the people decide to use it so we have two sources where we have the data of ourselves, of our elders which are the bibliotech and the great geographers of science and spirituality but we also access the information that is not complete that is of the state there you can clearly leave which are two forms of thinking we do not we do not have trust in the work that the state does because each time the institutions decrease or erode the right to the property of the territory or of respect call it collective property or individual property these sources geographic social in the land must be reliable and understandable for the same people that's what I wanted to say Thank you very much Hernando I think the issue of trust, sovereignty over data and information is a key issue here and that leads to a broader discussion on indigenous data sovereignty which I think as we mentioned in the beginning is really about the right to control information that is made available about yourself or your resources or your lands and I think this is an important point and there have been some questions in the chat so I would like to ask Christian one more question and then take some questions from the floor so that we can give an opportunity to our audience as well given some important questions for this so quickly I would like to ask you Christian in terms of civil society are you able to find the data that you need and are you able to share that information easily can you share and are you able to do so and after that we will then go to some of the questions from the audience that also relate to this issue of data and sovereignty Thank you Christian Thanks Tom I think as I said the civil society what we exactly need we need accurate data that can help in our evidence based lobby initiatives and if we cannot find a data that is developed in a GIS environment because when you are talking about the land the land has a spatial extent it has a location and when you have a database that is developed in a GIS environment it gives us the capacity to be able to analyse spatial realities and to be able to use that as a tool but it is hard to find this kind of data the kind of work that we do with local communities supporting their land rights you need to be able to have this one of them would be the satellite imagery for example we need that when we are doing participatory mapping to support our mapping but it is very difficult to always find you know good satellite imagery would do the solution that you can download freely and to use even we have like in Cameroon the government in the Ministry of Environment assign an MOU with the support of satellite imagery producers but when you want to use it you have to go through very cumbersome procedures it makes our work very very difficult we need the contracts of large scale land acquisitions so that we can be able to monitor complaints and clauses but when you go to open land contracts for example you will see a number of them but in the problematic large scale land acquisitions you will not see them so it gives me the impression that what you see in the open land contract are contracts that maybe the concern of local people were sought maybe it was more democratic when they were doing that and so they had they have to allow it open so that some people can access but we have lots and lots of problematic concession contracts that we cannot get we need to get through not only raster data but also getting the coordinates of data that have been collected on the free the maps that we can be able to use because one of the things also we realize in the work that we are doing is that most often what is presented in the paper contract in terms of certain area is different from the reality of the ground and we have been able to do this kind of redress where we have caused the government to track and redress the boundaries on the field so it is difficult to have this kind of data but that not be standing the civil society organization that are working especially in digital land and that have cartographic capabilities have been able to generate a lot of data also sometimes we do mapping with the community right up to the village land holders and when you look at that data it is also huge it is something that we have used now when it comes to sharing of the data I think there are concerns there we really we highly share our data and the reason is that you know most of these open data sources they have their own structures they have their own standards they also have their own protocols as well and sometimes you might not know who is really interested to use their data so we have highly shared data on the platforms what we do is that the data that we generate since we are using it for lobby advocacy initiatives we have regional observatories that we share with them we have national CSOs in Cameroon that we share our data that we carry out national campaigns and for advocacy actions I think to me what resonates more with me is that we have a lot of data in stock the civil society have collected a lot of data we need to make our data you know to be to be discovered by other people who really need to use the data thank you so much thank you Christian on that point I would like to invite the panel to reflect on a couple of questions from the floor the first one is about how do we balance the need for open data and the need to protect data for ethical reasons and I can probably link this to another question that was also given and it says data as it means to an end it can be used to claim rights fine but data can also be misused data can be used to deprive people of their rights so how do we balance this claim of ethical land data data to protect people's rights with the threat that the same data can be used to deprive people of rights if the panelists want to address that I would ask that you do it in one minute so that we can have a couple of questions to go through I could quickly go about it go through one I've heard that question so many times already and it's the same as the hammer example that I was giving so any tool that you have can be used for good or for bad you can use a hammer to build a house and you can use a hammer to kill a person it depends on how you use it and how you prepare the tool itself normally with regards to privacy rights when you collect data about land and any other type of information that you collect that contains information related to that can be used to identify a person or a particular group of people you need to always have care to properly anonymize this data and to remove the data points that could be used to identify people this is like open data 101 when you are releasing people that are data that are related to people in the sense normally the parts cannot be related to people are health and economic data and security data so normally land rights relate to economic because it means that people can know what you have and this can be tricky and on the other hand I've also heard stories that was used to actually know where the loopholes of lands that do not have owners in general I've heard this from India I think that were used for people that are really bad to go and claim these lands that were supposed to be from no one so this is not the problem from the data itself it's a problem of area related to data so this is something that we need to be really careful about. Let me ask Royal another question that comes from the floor and once again just please one minute how did in your experience how did you take into account free prior and informed consent when generating open data at the community level do you have an answer in terms of the work that you did in the media? Okay quick one I'm going to say it quick but slow they firstly it was the community's desire to collect the data they said that we explained what the benefits of data collection is and what the data will be used for so firstly the communities said yes they want to participate in the data collection process and secondly the community want that we're collecting the data the NGO, Namibia Housing Action Group provided technical assistance in terms of how the data should be collected and also just the verification and data validation process through that basically it was the community's desire to collect and that's why we did it. Okay thank you I'm going to go back to our panelists and I want to ask Hernando and I catch under that last point that he made so I want to follow up with Hernando but I'm asking everybody now to give me a one minute answer to the question so I want to ask Hernando how does indigenous data sovereignty support the inherent rights of indigenous people to self-determination and self-governance? When they don't have anything the origin of the data to use it what is it going to solve with that data and if you're ordering from reliable information it's viable to work on the contrary when you're born of the same body of the same environment it's viable to work on but when it comes from the outside it will already have other interests and we don't understand it so it wouldn't be viable to give credibility to the validation I can answer that Thank you very much that's a very powerful answer to Hernando about the inherent right to data for self-determination that the data originates with the community is owned with the community how does this translate or what is the nexus between this interplay for the community that you are working with between the formal and the informal how can you harness the power of data for the communities to assert themselves Yo, okay I'm going to see from which direction I'll answer this one the first point was that the communities that we worked with were able to see the effect of the data collection I would say one point that Juan also raised that the purpose of the data collection was essential was important there were issues around whether the data will be used to evict the community or not so the communities had to understand what the purpose of the data was and I'm also linking this to what Hernando mentioned so the formal side of it I'm saying we now because I was part of the Namibia Housing Action Group at home we managed to get into a collaborative agreement with the Namibia Statistics Agency on collecting data so if we are discussing issues around informal settlements and data standards I think through the memorandum of understanding that the Shectualis Federation had we're able to have that discussion on standards etc and then this also opens up the other door where some stakeholders are still not sure whether the community's data is up to standard or not and we believe if we continue operationalizing the memorandum of understanding with the Namibia Statistics Agency it might help remove some of this doubt which I think it's really uncalled for in my own opinion Thank you Moela that's another interesting perspective of formalizing or getting official recognition in this particular case for the data so I want to ask Juan who spoke earlier about some of these negative and positive experiences data experiences what improvements would you like to see with regards to open land data what is possible? It's possible everything is possible what I've seen is that there is a lot of capacity in general to analyze data but this capacity is not normally installed where it should be installed I mean in the government because at the end of the day they are the ones that should manage this data and take informed decisions based on this right something that could be really quickly fixed is the fact that they do not understand how to manage geographical data in general and if they do understand a bit at least of how to manage geographical data they do not know how to analyze this data and how to integrate this data with other data for example census data or any other economical data so I think that some quick fix could be that of telling them how to use like setting some courses or collaboration opportunities with them in order to help them to understand because normally there are there is this willingness what is happening is the agency in the sense that they do not have the capacity and not only governments but also local communities I mean having the tool like in the example that I was giving before having the bobsled tractor to do the swimming pool but not knowing how to use it it's not useful I mean you need to know how to use tools and I think that there are a lot of people that would be willing to to build this capacity in CSOs local communities in government and I think that could be a quick fix that we can all collaborate and work with Thank you I mean you've talked now a little bit about the capacity Royal has said earlier that communities do have capacity and I'm going to put Christian on the spark here now because I saw him nodding when Royal was saying that so I want to ask him okay we recognize that that can be improved but how do you raise awareness and education in communities about the importance of data when communities are faced with needs for board and sanitation and shelter and land rights how do you make communities aware educate communities with regards to how important data might be for improving their conditions Christian I think you are addressing the question to me right Yes Okay so I think that it is true in the community the community's needs can be brought it can be varied it can move from the social, economic culture and whatever but the importance of data each time that we have to begin a participatory mapping process we explain the process in detail from the start to the end who will be the stakeholder what kind of data will be collected why is it that that kind of data is collected because in the community you see the conflict that exists in the community now it's more than the conflict that exists between intercommunity and this is because even families are now at loggerheads and they are having a lot of conflict because of land so the data that we collect and how we convince them to keep their buying of the data it's about the problem that the data will solve in the communities especially in those communities where you have different land surfaces that you have multiple uses you can have a community where one surface area where they are doing farming different cropping, you have rice you might have maize and you have so and in order for that problem to be resolved you need to be able to have the data about it so that the community now come up with what you will call bylaws or community protocols to be able to avoid those conflicts the defined period when each activity has to start and when it has to end thank you thank you I want to stop you there because I think that's a good point about the community setting some rules the community understanding that process and I want to ask everybody now please while we are still here sorry to cut the short question let's test the understanding of open data so Neil if you can share the poll and I would like everybody to go through that poll again and answer the questions the scoring system is the same A1 is I have an excellent understanding A5 is I have an excellent understanding and we will look at that results we have three minutes left and I really want to thank everybody for the discussion I think we've covered a lot of ground I know there's a lot of questions remaining for all of us and I'm sorry that we can't address all of them but I want to know maybe while we are doing the poll ask our panelists one sentence just any last thoughts that you would like to share with us on this topic and I'm going to start with you Christian so the rest of my colleagues can think about that really just 15 seconds your last thoughts on this topic I'm starting with you Christian yes I think there is the potential to develop the open data source and I think the open data is very very useful not only to civil society but to the different people in the country for government, for local communities for indigenous communities and I think that if civil society organizations can be able to share the data that they have generated I think they have a huge data and we need to make it discoverable usable and be able to share thank you Christian can I ask Hernando to share with us his last thoughts on this topic two ways to organize things if we understand and the states don't understand the reality because the data is used for different dimensions that can improve the conditions and the quality of the good living of the indigenous population in their territory of origin today they want to return but with everything we have gone through prior to let's say these information are let's say secondary sources primary sources primordial they are not defined as the people want and there is a confusion of terminology that is currently not being clarified and then it tends more to do business than the quality of life of the people in different territories or regions of the world that must have a clarity that I wanted to share with you is that the data in large part is useful whenever in the best way to solve problems and needs that they have in some areas of the region. Thank you very much Ananda for sharing that with us let me quickly move over to Royal 10 seconds 30 seconds open data is not cheap opening up data and making it available online is another process that happens through a cheap process so we should look at finding ways to fund the activities of civil society organization. Thank you Royal I'm going to ask Juan for his last 5 seconds statement. To me it would be focused on the purpose of data on the base problem that you are trying to solve please take into account the context that you are trying to solve with people there is always people willing to help you work with projects with a purpose. Thank you very much I think the one thing that has popped up is trust in what the data is useful it's trust in the relationship between the producers of the data that everybody trusts each other's motive so I think that's an important element that comes out here but I want to thank all the panelists this has been a fantastic discussion and I really appreciate it thank you for taking the survey and remember this is a webinar series so this is just the first of several there are more webinars coming to you over the course of the year and we will inform you the dates through our newsletters and our other media from both ends and the land portals on our websites. Thank you very much I hope you had a good day. I certainly have thank you thanks bye bye