1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People
by steve＠techmatters.org
Although a rather grandiose name, the "1000 Landscapes" project is geared towards delivering finance and technology tools to support local landscape leaders in building a multi-stakeholder partnership, identifying goals that are important to their community, and implementing the changes to reach those goals. You can see the high degree of alignment with HERMOSA, so we have been watching the progress with interest.
In parallel, we have been conducting interview with our target audience worldwide, and the synthesis of those conversations, the common "user stories" (in modern design language), are below. We would love to have feedback on whether these stories fit with your own experiences in the field, with local community leaders!
Specifically:
1) Have you identified any high-priority software-technology opportunities that we have missed entirely?
2) How would you modify these stories to better match your own understanding of the greatest need?
You can read more about 1000 Landscapes here:
https://ecoagriculture.org/blog/introducing-1000-landscapes-for-1-billion... (intro blog post)
https://techmatters.org/project/1000-landscapes/ (our website page)
Regards,
Steve Francis, Project Director
Tech Matters (techmatters.org)
THE STORIES
1. Software isn’t useful unless…
* it runs on the hardware we have: mostly Android smartphones, with some laptop access in the office
* it works even when I don’t have a connection right now
* it provides support for the language(s) spoken in my community
* it keeps private data private, and allows us control over our data
2. We need to gather, manipulate, store, communicate, and re-use data about our community and landscape
* We need a directory of our community, so that we can communicate with the right people based on their role and interests.
* Sometimes we need to gather specific information about crops, herds, water, soil, or even illegal activities.
* We need access to data that other people have gathered about our landscape (universities, governments, and so forth).
* We need to store this data securely, preserving its privacy, and ensuring that it is available to us for years to come.
* We need software that allows us to organize and manipulate the data to meet specific reporting obligations, and make persuasive charts and graphs.
3. Maps are important, and making and sharing them is too hard
* Maps on our laptop screens are helpful, but we need a way to present map data to our community in ways which are more accessible and understandable: big paper maps so everyone can see, and offline maps designed for the smartphone so everyone can zoom in and out.
* We need to be able to take an existing map, and add information that is important to our community.
* Whenever we gather or receive data that is associated with particular places in our landscape, we would like to be able to display that information on a map.
* When we have data from different points in time, we want to make a map-movie, showing how things are changing.
4. We need help communicating better
* Community: We need to be able to deliver important education and alerts to our community (specific to their role and interests) and ask them questions and let them tell us what is happening -- even if they only have a feature phone or a radio.
* Other Landscapes: We need to be able to find other landscape initiatives that are facing problems like ours, and learn from them. We are happy to share our experiences in return.
* Funders: We need to create complete and persuasive presentation materials to help secure funding and report to funders on our impact and progress.
* The World: We need help telling our story to the world -- to buyers about our unique or superior products, to tourists about what makes our landscape special, to investors who might invest in our enterprises and to universities who might help us study and improve our interventions towards sustainable development.
5. We need more money
* We need to find funding sources, whether national or international, that are likely to help with sustainable landscape projects like ours.
* When we are applying for funding, we need to know how to make our application more likely to succeed.
* When trying to choose between different projects in our landscape, or what to work on first, it would be helpful to know which project will be easier to fund.
3 years, 4 months