 Bill Taylor, who is the president and managing partner of the Map My Rights Foundation. Noel has 16 years of experience working on land administration in developing countries and is formerly the VP of strategy and international operations for Thompson Reuters government. Welcome Noel. Thank you. Well, like Chris I was fortunate enough to wake up one morning and think oh my god what am I doing here moments shortly after I quickly wrapped up my uni degree and headed to Armenia to work on a USAID funded project for land titling and made use of the free alcohol that existed on the planes flying through London over at that point. But it was only after one or two weeks in the field that I quickly learned that a lot of the theory I'd been studying on land rights and the importance of catastrophe and land rights in developing countries was BS. Once you get on the ground it's a whole lot different to what you read in the books. So you know I've been very fortunate enough to work in that field for a long time and have seen the number of the same places that Chris has. I lived in Sri Lanka for a while. Fortunately I got out two days before the tsunami. A lot of time in Afghanistan over the last three years as well. Guinea more recently and lived in Egypt for a couple of years as well as Ukraine. So although property rights may be something that you don't instantly associate with humanitarian crises this issue of property rights seems to follow this what larger issue of human rights and humanitarian crisis around the world whether they be disasters or human made issues. And I think that the property rights is an area that the humanitarian aid sector isn't really dealing with very well and they've even recognized that themselves in some of the reviews they've done. So if we look at property rights I know in, am I skipping here? In this part of the world we're very familiar with having secure property rights and secure tenure. Now security of tenure really is a perception. It's what we've grown up with. It's what we feel comfortable with not necessarily formal. If you look at property itself it really brings identity to people and communities as well and underpinning the importance of property is the role that it plays as part of the wealth effect. And if we look at the wealth pyramid we have almost 80% of the world living holding wealth of less than $10,000 per household. You have 90% of the world which holds less than $100,000 a household in wealth. Property rights make up a large percentage of that household wealth and in developing countries this is actually magnified considerably. So if you look at some of our neighbors and examples nearby with Indonesia and India upwards of 80% contribution towards that household wealth. So you see what an important role it plays when we start dealing with the issue of rights and if we have disasters or conflicts. But there are other problems that actually start hitting up this sector itself as well. More than 80% of the world's population do not have formal property records. There's no record of where they live. Now that's fairly shocking but you've only got 30 to 50 OECD, I mean, sorry, 30 to 50 develop common land systems in place. So it's really no surprise that this large population of undocumented property people and rights out there. And that exacerbated displacement from conflicts or crises, particularly humanitarian crises. If we look at the tsunami obviously that was a shocking event. Hundreds of thousands of people displaced and killed. If you look at the land office though, there were 60,000 property records destroyed. Around 12 months later I think it was in West Java there was civil unrest and one of the land offices was destroyed with 160,000 property records. Now that population is still in place but their records are gone. They were paper-based, they were just in a normal government building. And this feeds into this whole conflict between statutory systems and the customary systems that exist out there for managing property rights. We see this legal pluralism trying to be dealt with in some countries and in a lot of places it just doesn't work. That opens itself up then obviously to land grabs that we see happening a lot in Africa and in parts of South America as well. The world has tried to respond. The World Bank is one of the major donors in this area putting billions of dollars into this over the last 20 years or 30 years and they've had 60 land sector projects alone and there are around 20 that are still going on at the moment. One of the key areas they always try to invest into is building up the the surveying sector or the formal land professional sector. Unfortunately though there is still a dearth of resources globally in places like New Zealand and Australia. There's even a looming shortage of of surveyors. Give you an example in Uganda there are less than 50 licensed surveyors for the whole country and the situation is worse in other places like Guinea where there are no licensed surveyors per se and the number of government staff there is actually minimal at work in this field. So that drives this issue a little bit further as well and even those countries that do have formal systems in place are usually corrupt or they're not actually meeting demands as well. So Transparency International identifies land as one of the most corrupted sectors globally and it's something that I've personally seen in a lot of places as well particularly places like Ukraine which is obvious and in Afghanistan as well. So people stay out of the system they don't want to come into the system. When I worked in Cairo more than 90 percent of the population of Cairo was actually outside the formal system. That doesn't mean there's not a vibrant land market and that things aren't happening. People just choose to stay outside the system. So these interventions coming from donors like the World Bank, USA, DFID, they're not really hitting the mark on what they need to do. And IT always plays a big role in these projects as well. So unfortunately a lot of the IT is dictated by surveyors when it comes to these projects and I can say that because I've come from the surveying background myself. Hopefully I'm painted with a different brush given the background that I've had in the exposure but it's a sector that is very slow to move and adopt change. Gradually though particularly with pushing from the likes of geographers and others the role of GIS and particularly now web mapping and cloud solutions has come a long way. So the web maps or the layers brought by web maps help us normalize the data and bring greater transparency to all of these different data sources in terms of compiling it, visualizing it and analyzing it. And it's really that analysis piece that gets left behind as well. A lot of people don't understand the value of being able to analyze that data when advocating for change. If you can bring evidence-based results and show conflicts that are gender-based or minority based it strengthens the argument to drive change within government and also brings pressure to bear from other governments on those scenarios as well. As I said the sector for land with surveyors driving it has been slow. The International Federation of Surveys to its credit has worked in developing standards through ISO such as the land administration domain model, the social tenure domain model and more recently coming up with a document on spatially fit for purpose. But this really sort of acts as a two-way street. Surveys use this as a little bit of a control mechanism as well. So we have to balance the fact that these standards are being developed and on the other hand we see stuff going on around in the background where they're still trying to retain control and that's one of the big risks associated with technology. Over the last few years the UN FAO has developed an open source solution for land administration which started off as a client-serve application and now they have a field app as well but it's very much limited to the idea or the concept of formalising property rights. Going out just doing data collection in an environment which would be agricultural rule or urban and then giving somebody a piece of paper at the end of it. It's very narrow focus and they also get to control who gets to log in and create these community servers and put their data up. Similarly UN Habitat has created not to be too confusing but STDM software so it's called social tenure domain software even though that is a subset of the ISO standard as well and it's only just been opened up to the community to a very narrow group within the community to start talking about the source code and how they might improve that as well but that's still very much a desktop solution at the moment and hasn't gone mobile and it's not been embraced widely by the sector because it's really been built around the concept of enumeration surveys and that's reflective of what the UN does a lot of in terms of going out and collecting data on where they may start to assign more resources as well. DFID in the UK has supported Rainforest UK in developing and mapping for rights not to be confused with Map My Rights platform. It's built on some open source technology but again it's Rainforest UK who gets to control who gets an account to log in and the data they're collecting is not publicised but there's no API you can't feed that back out and reuse it. You have to specifically request to do that. They have understandable reasons for doing some of that but they're a lot more locked down than would normally be the case if you're adhering to an open data concept and in principle WRI looking at the global For Us Watch platform built on KatoDB which enables you to do some tracking for displacement of indigenous populations in those communities as well and more recently I was involved in a mobile technology pilot for Land Rights Starter Collection which is going on in Tanzania and that's sort of embryonic steps towards what we're talking about with the Map My Rights Foundation as well and that brings us to the foundation now like any good startup and we are a very much a startup Map My Rights is facing some trademark issues so we won't be operating under this banner for too much longer we're going through a renaming project as we speak but this is what our vision really is it's supporting communities and citizens directly being open and transparent not just on land and property but other resource rights and enabling other people to use what we have bring other data sources very much like you know the missing map projects will be a key data set that we're able to value add to we're able to use to it and then feed data back in as well as we update data through you know our network of intermediaries as well and make it open there will be some challenges around that and we'll talk about those in a little bit but it's a little bit different to those other scenarios in that we're not going to be bound by the use case those other solutions that we're talking about are very narrow fields of focus that they're working in so we want to be able to use new sensors and basically we're all walking talking sensors with a mobile you know phone these days ourselves but here we have guys doing your land use planning in Afghanistan associated with land tenure formalization as part of the informal settlement upgrading you know 30 years of Taliban rule and you have people living outside what were the the soviet city maps so how do we now bring them into the system how do we put roads and infrastructure in place you have your resource conflict in Burma artisanal diamond mining in West Africa working with government as well government needs to be part of the solution we're not talking about excluding government we very much want to bring progressive governments in particular on board a lot of governments don't have the capacity to build the infrastructure required to manage these effectively let alone the idea that they may not be accepted anyway you know working in urban environments in terms of infrastructure coming in post disaster you know look at tsunamis look at the Haiti earthquake one of the biggest problems that some of the aid agencies faced was unclear tenure situation so they couldn't start rebuilding shelter for people because of you know land issues and you know a contentious one obviously is agricultural investments there are some agricultural companies out there that do want to adopt principles of good governance there are investment funds that want to work with clients and you know do those but we also need to be able to capture those that aren't working in that area if they're just doing land grabs and being able to show those and the advocates have the data then to work you know to improve those situations so open open sources very much at the core of what we're talking about you know we're regularly getting emails from the likes of easery and others the big GIS providers to say can we provide your platform we've got the solution ready for you you don't need to do anything just give us the data uh that's not where we're going to go we will obviously engage with those sorts of groups where we can if they have data that they want to provide and provide it widely and and free of charge but open source as the infrastructure itself is what we're all about we mentioned the missing maps project and i don't think the value of of what kate and hot are doing can be um you know overstated it's uh it's vitally important to map people we talk about the idea of rights but it's the identity that comes with capturing people and property together as well which is really a great outcome from what we're trying to do although we'll have a hosted platform and you know agencies or NGOs individuals will be able to log on create their own spaces and put their own data up we want a collaborative layer where an open network of developers and users comes together and develops their own apis and that's why i'm saying we don't want to be bound and we're not going to be bound by the use case itself so we have to figure out how we're going to bring in a lot of unstructured data and bring some sense to it all and it won't just be you know digits it'll be photographs videos audio the works how are we going to hold that but land and resources is really at the core of what we're talking about so um we're not going to go too far into other gis areas like transport health etc we're really looking at at land and resources and we want to serve that data back out as well so yes we'll get data in from our users but we want to put it back out having the technology there is fine but what's really going to make this work and what is different again to those other examples is the fact that they've stayed very much in house apart from the the UN FAO effort they've kept it all locked down they haven't thought of the ecosystem beyond who's going to use this who's going to maintain it who's going to get the greatest value who's going to bring the greatest value so we want to link in with NGOs and CSOs that can share their successes and their stories to expedite the work of another group over here we want to work with academics so that they can do the research into this looking at unintended consequences from formalizing data we want to engage with governments as i mentioned and we definitely want to engage with the open source developer community as much as possible as we start building out our platform and you know certainly not the the lowest priority but the highest priority is the citizens and the communities themselves how do we get to them crowd sourcing is a fantastic concept but if people as individuals don't know that something exists how do you get the scale to bring them into the platform and that's where NGOs and even government enable us to bring scale of data into the system and that further reinforces the utility of what we're going to do it won't be one of the biggest challenges that we we face is unintended consequences last year i was at a conference and there was a presentation by transparent Chennai who'd been working in some urban slums around Chennai and they'd published the data and then all of a sudden the community was outraged because all they're now on the map they didn't want to be on the map that's just given the governmental list of people to go and bulldoze the houses for or if you don't protect the data you don't give people the decision on what data they want published you give the ruling elite you know the hit list fine let's go out now and just wipe these people out this is something that we're looking at in terms of user data user driven data privacy what do they lock down so you can see that there is a property there and it's owned by somebody but you don't necessarily see who owns it because you know it's getting that location information and you might supplement that with other data like household survey or census data if you're collecting that as well to be able to use it for other applications so we're going to work with the open data institute in the UK and tactical technology collective in coming up with policies on this but also developing training materials that we can put out for NGOs or the implementing groups to understand the concept of data security data security and privacy you know over the last 16 years I've worked on programs that have formalized hundreds of thousands or actually a few million properties but when I think about it there was no training to the the companies on protecting the the data you've got on your computer someone could just walk away with a laptop with 50 000 properties and all of the details of the people on that because they've gone out and they've collected that data but no one's actually thought about that and a little more complex is is the trust and rating systems how do we know that the data that's going in there is actually correct and this is where we need to start working initially with NGOs that can bring some scale and get trusted intermediaries and get those rating systems in place as well there are some automated routines obviously to check that yes if this is coming in off a mobile phone is the location actually close to where they're saying this property is located financial sustainability is a big issue for a startup but thankfully you know we're we're well along the way of achieving that for our first few years of operation building the team behind myself and the others who are on board now without having that financial sustainability over the last nine months I've found it to be challenging on board and say yep I'm going to do it not knowing whether the money is there or not but since we're getting there and we've got some support from the immediate network that that is even less of an issue now and user adoption you know it's great to just throw something out there for use but if you don't already have the target audience or the market identified or some examples to go by it makes it even harder it is a sector which is screaming out for more work in this areas so what we're going to do is focus on building some depth of scale in our initial pilots in talking with the founder of Ushahidi last year the one thing that she said she would have changed is not looking at how many countries they can immediately hit with their platform because that's a nice impressive number but getting depth of scale of where they're working so they can show real results you know a large volume of data in you know much smaller number of places so where do we currently stand well once the the agreement was reached with a media network we were able to become incorporated in in November the paperwork is going in to have us registered with IRS as a US non-profit and it might sound a little strange that there's an Australian accent up here that's got them US incorporated group but that's how it is we're location agnostic I like to say so we're not necessarily just trying to lock people down and move them around we're very flexible as a team and you know I've worked with a a disjointed group over the last 15 years in software development it works if you've got the right people processes and systems in place and it's you know it's been an issue that people often bring up well how do you how do you do this is this going to be a big issue and it's about getting those things in place at the beginning. Pierre Amidia and the Amidia network have you know given us a four million dollar grant for the first three years of operations and we're going through due diligence with DFID right now for almost another 3.2 and that really gives us financial sustainability over the first three years to to not only focus on building a platform that meets the user needs rather than rushing to try and build a Rolls Royce and then come out in 18 months and say okay what do you think but incrementally get pilots and partners on board without having to worry about going out and trying to scratch together that money and with others that I've spoken to in this sector I understand how significant an amount that is for a group like us in this nonprofit world. We're going to work with Habitat for Humanity and our initial pilots in Columbia where they're working with informal settlements around Medellin and Carly and Lanternia formalization is part of that but that's only part of it. They do a lot of other data collection that they want to use this platform for. Thankfully now we're out starting to recruit for a lead technologist and I use that term rather than CTO because it's it's not the traditional CTO sort of model it's it's somebody who's going to have a much wider remit than just a CTO and and roll not just on the technology side but also on the community side when we come to the open source developer place and and really now just starting to to build the rest of the ecosystem so hopefully you know I can come back in 12 months if the humanitarian team gets a another invitation and present on the results that we've achieved in what we think is going to be you know a very important technology piece in this sector that really needs it. Thank you.