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Technical Competition
The GEO-LDN Competition was an international technology innovation competition to design and build software analytics solutions to support more transparent and well-informed land use decisions at the local to national level across the globe. Winning solutions will be promoted by the GEO-LDN Initiative and the UNCCD for use by all countries committed to set voluntary LDN targets and to monitor and report on SDG Indicator 15.3.1 “Proportion of land that is degraded over total land area”. The winner(s) of the competition will also benefit from financial and technical support valued at USD 100,000 for the transformation of the prototype into an operational and scalable tool, and a 2-year license for free access to use Google Earth Engine (GEE) as part of their solution. The following is a record of the competition parameters:
Who owns the IP rights of the fully-fledged tool that will be developed by the winning team with the expected financial and technical support valued at USD 100,000?
The winning consortium will retain the IP rights throughout the tool development process. Nevertheless, it should be noted that by submitting a proposal to the Competition, the consortium confirmed accepting the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. Under the GNU General Public license, the authors agree to provide the software as open source so that others may use or modify the software without infringement of a copyright, as long as they acknowledge the consortium as owners of the original software.
What is the intended evaluation scope on data security/ data protection?
Tool-concepts should be developed considering the following aspects:
· The ability for countries to access and process only their data
· Assurance that other countries/entities cannot access sovereign datasets without the owner’s express permission
· The ability for countries to confidentially test analytical scenarios before submission of their final reports
· A facility to securely store data including backups.
Would an open-source platform and a mobile application that allows citizens to upload information on the ground and in real time qualify for the competition?
Validation of the spatial data is critical, and citizen science can do a lot to improve information on local conditions, but a range of similar tools already exist (e.g. Collect Earth, LandPKS). To qualify for the competition proposed tools must address the required science question in the competition which relates specifically to the development of a land use planning tool to assess neutrality (i.e, provide guidance to plan and implement remediation activities to prevent increases in the extent of degraded land at the national scale).