New paper: Connecting people, sharing knowledge, increasing transparency

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[Summary: Linking to a short conference paper exploring the impact of the web on land governance]

After a few contributions I made to their online dialogue, the lovely folk at The Land Portal invited me to help them writing up the dialogue and putting together a paper for the upcoming World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty. They’ve just published the result over here (also accessible via this direct PDF link).

The paper itself was a rather rapid creation between the end of the online dialogue and the end of February deadline, but aims to weave together a number of strands important to thinking about how digital technology is changing the landscape for advocacy and work on land governance. It has a particular focus on women’s land rights, which, in the Land Portal’s online dialogue, stimulated lots of interesting discussions about the potentially gendered nature of digital technologies. In it we survey how the Web has evolved from Web 1 (documents), to Web 2 (communities) and onwards towards a possible Web 3 of open and linked open data.

The Land Portal team, since getting involved in last years Open Knowledge Festival, have been really exploring what open data and open development might mean for them – and the Portal is definitely a space to watch to see how ideas of open development might be put into practice in the very grounded and wide-reaching field of land governance.

Joining the Web Foundation, and projects old and new

[Summary: an update on some of the hats I might be wearing]

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After working for the last eight or so months putting the project together, I’ve now formally joined the World Wide Web Foundation as research coordinator on the ‘Exploring the Emerging Impacts of Open Data in Developing Countries (ODDC)’ programme.

It’s a two-year multi-country research project, exploring how open data is working in different settings across the world, funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre. You can read more about the project over on the Web Foundation website and follow the project as it develops over at www.opendataresearch.org.

With this, I’ve switched my PhD work to part-time, but will continue to work with AidInfo on work related to the International Aid Transparency Initiative, and working through Practical Participation on assorted innovation and advocacy projects.