Hello!

Things are moving fast at Digital Commons Cooperative this month.

👥 Two new developers joined the team

We're really pleased to share that we've brought two new developers on board. They'll be working across LandExplorer and Mykomaps, helping us move forward on the features and improvements our users have been asking for. We're so glad they've joined us!

🚀 Crowdfunder launching soon

Next month we're launching a crowdfunder to support the next phase of LandExplorer and we wanted to give you a heads up before it goes live.

We're committed to ensuring LandExplorer is always free to use. It enables hundreds of campaigners, journalists, community groups, and researchers to access information about land ownership that used to be locked away behind expensive tools and GIS teams. We want to keep it that way.

But running it on short-term grants has made it hard to maintain data quality and build the features people need consistently over time. So this year we're experimenting with a community-supported model: we’re introducing a paid tier to create a more sustainable path forward.

Here's what that means in practice:

The free tier stays. The core of LandExplorer will always be free and we’ll continue to actively improve it… better search, updated data, and new layers are all coming as part of this work.

The paid tier will fund these improvements for everyone, and include some advanced features we know organisations need, like API access and data exports. By giving better-resourced organisations and researchers a way to pay for access, we create a model where they fund the development that benefits grassroots groups who can't afford to pay.

The crowd funder will enable us to build out these new features and relaunch LandExplorer later this year. Crowdfunder supporters will have a direct say in which features we prioritise first. It will launch soon and we will be sharing how you can contribute then!

In the meantime, you can read more about where we're headed and why here.

That's it for now.

Speak soon,

The DCC team