We are excited to share some great news about our successful collaboration with Village Earth, a nonprofit non-governmental organization (NGO) that works for the empowerment of rural and indigenous communities around the world by strengthening intermediate and grassroots organizations through fiscal sponsorship, networking, training, research and advocacy.
Background
Village Earth helps reconnect communities to the resources that promote human well-being by enhancing social and political empowerment, community self-reliance and self-determination. One of the main goals of Village Earth is to provide training in participatory community-based development and that has been one of its primary activities.
The Native Land Information System project
Currently, Village Earth is building a CKAN national data portal for Native Americans and Tribes in the United States.
The Native Lands Information System (NLIS) will be a clearinghouse for data related to American Indian Lands. The purpose of the portal is to promote greater transparency and collaboration in furtherance of Indian land claims, assessing the impact of various current and historical policies on Native Americans and evaluating the performance of the federal government in its various agreements and treaties with Native Nations and in its self-appointed role as trustee over Indian lands.
Our Contribution
During the past weeks, Keitaro’s team of experienced CKAN developers worked closely with Village Earth to improve the design of their data portal and add additional functionalities through CKAN extensions. Our team inspected the current installation and ensured its stability. In addition to this, numerous CKAN extensions were utilized to offer benefits to the users of the portal, including:
- Data-Store function which enables the storage of structured data and allows previewing data through the Data Explorer
- Commenting and open discussions option that enables users to post comments and lead discussions directly on the portal
- Ability to harvest and share land use data from various sources including the US government’s data portal www.data.gov.
- Activity tracking and analytics
- Enabled integration with useful systems such as Tableau, a system that can help anyone see and understand their data.
As an active contributor to the CKAN community as well as the global open data community, we are honored to have worked on Village Earth’s Native Land Information System and applied our expertise to make this important project a success.
