There is currently considerable interest from communities in accessing land and buildings in order to manage them for long term community benefit. This interest ranges from preventing the loss, sale or development of existing public or community assets that are in public, private or charitable ownership, to securing long term community ownership or management in order to deliver community led regeneration. The types of assets range from community centres to shops, pubs, parks, woodlands and farmland. 

In all cases 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 Data can be fragmented, opaque, out of date and hard to access. 

To help with this, Shared Assets will be undertaking desk research, doing interviews with key stakeholders, and running workshops with community groups, to understand the data already out there and its characteristics, as well as what other information community groups need to succeed. Then we will collaborate with Digital Commons who will develop the Land Explorer mapping platform to try and meet some of these needs, and further test this technology with community groups. We may then plan to and seek funding for a bigger programme of work to take on more development of Land Explorer to support community groups even more comprehensively with their data needs.

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