Digital Commons Coop early Summer newsletter!
Hello everyone!
Welcome to your latest instalment of the (infrequent!) Digital Commons Cooperative Newsletter. Read on for updates on Land Explorer, new projects, and a sneak peak of our plans for 2024…
Land Explorer new release!
We’re excited to share with you the latest Spring Release of LandExplorer. We’ve been working hard to get a few much anticipated features out to the growing community of activists, community organisers, land enthusiasts and social businesses that use LandExplorer to find information about the land around them.
With this latest release:
Now teams can edit the same map together, making it easier to use LandExplorer as a land planning tool for your community.
We’ve improved the land ownership searching functionality, including making it easier to use on mobile.
You can now let us know how you’re using LandExplorer from within the app. Knowing how your community sees LandExplorer helps us to tell a compelling story to partners and funders so we can keep improving it. (You can also tell us here).
Groups that use private data layers to collect and share land information can now colour code these markers.
Loads of small bug fixes and usability tweaks to generally make LandExplorer easier to use.
We have a brand-new user guide to help you navigate Land Explorer: check it out here! https://digital-commons.gitbook.io/landexplorer-user-guide
New project klaxon! Data for community assets
We are partnering with one of our founding organisations, Shared Assets, on this exciting project to support local groups wanting to take on community assets with the data and digital tools they need to be successful.
Anyone looking to save or secure land and buildings as community assets faces significant challenges in finding the data and information they need to be able to secure these assets. Data can be fragmented, opaque, out of date and hard to access.
After a period of desk research and workshops, led by Shared Assets, we will be working to update Land Explorer to meet some of the data needs the research identifies. Find out more about the project on the Shared Assets website, and watch this space for more details!
Taking a global perspective - the Cooperative World Map
Our MykoMaps platform is the basis for an exciting new project. In celebration of the United Nations declaring 2025 as the International Year of Cooperatives, we’re collaborating with our partners at DotCooperation to revolutionise how coops connect, communicate and showcase their global impact. We’ll be creating a directory and interactive map which will mean anyone can find information on coops across the world.
New workers.coop map
Closer to home, we're also really happy to have developed a new map for the UK's excellent new worker coop federation workers.coop. You can find it at https://www.workers.coop/map
That’s all for now!
If you’d like to support our work you can do so via opencollective.com/digitalcommonscoop
Or feel free to get in touch by responding to this email :)
all the best,
Kate, Colm, Lynne, Rohit, Marcel and Nick - the Digital Commons team