Help Us Map the Property Rights Community

Help us map the Property Rights community-- Announcing a new project from FPR

The ecosystem of people working on land and property rights issues is large and fragmented, making it challenging for everyone involved to navigate. This year, the Future of Property Rights program at New America will develop a social network map of the property rights community. That map will be improved over time with additional information and maintained as a resource for the property rights community. Please help us bring together people and organizations working on property rights by contributing to our research.  Our intention is to publish the map by the end of the year.

Link to survey  |  http://bit.ly/FPR-Survey

1. Why this is needed

In large parts of the world, tenure security is weak. Existing approaches for registering and securing tenure are under increasing stress from urbanization, population growth, and climate change. Despite the clear need to improve the tools and systems we are using to register property and secure tenure, change has been slow. We believe that the complexity and segmentation of the community of people and organizations involved in these issues, which includes nonprofits, tech companies, media outlets, governments, and civil society, further slows progress. Better understanding the broad network of actors in the property rights space will make it easier for non-traditional or under-utilized people and organizations to share tools and methods for improving land tenure security.

2. How you can help

Our approach to mapping the property rights ecosystem relies in large part upon the crowdsourced information. The usefulness of the end product for you --and the community at large-- will be a function of the quality of information garnered from the survey.  To support this effort you can do three things:

• Take the survey:  In a few minutes, you can clarify your role, organization, & area of focus within the property rights community.

• Nominate others for the survey and mapping:  The survey asks you to nominate others who you work with on property rights issues and should be included in the mapping

• Share the survey with your networks: If you believe your wider network would be interested in or benefit from contributing from our map, please share this survey with your network.  Here is a short link for the survey: bit.ly/FPR-Survey

A note on privacy: The social network map we publish will not include email addresses submitted as part of the survey. The map will only include publicly available information.

3. What will happen with all this information?

FPR will build an interactive ecosystem map (using a data visualization platform called Kumu) of the organizations and individuals working on property rights and land tenure issues. The more details you share in the survey about who you are and what you do, the easier it will be to build connections with an individual or organization working on relevant projects. Better inputs will also help produce more accurate outputs, in the form of Social Network Analysis metrics and a community detection algorithm. These tools will help to show the broader picture of how people, organizations and networks fit together and form the property rights ecosystem. Who don’t you know that would be worth knowing? How influential are you in the space? Who else are people working with? Who is doing interesting work that is under-recognized?

Help make it easier for you and the rest of the community to cut through complexity, find new partners and, ultimately, new solutions to the property rights challenges that connect us.

About us:

New America is a nonpartisan think tank focused on innovative solutions to large-scale public policy challenges. The Future of Property Rights program is working to bring new actors and perspectives into the property rights space.   For more information, see www.NewAmerica.org/FPR.  Please reach out to FPR@newamerica.org with any questions to let us know about any similar ongoing efforts we can collaborate with or previous mappings we integrate into our analysis.

Link to this article: bit.ly/FPR-Mapping-Launch

Link to survey: bit.ly/FPR-Survey