Talking Titler is a land tenure information software system, currently under development, that allows a great deal of flexibility in the way data relating to people, land and evidentiary media (titles, deeds, survey plans, descriptive documents, audio records of oral testimonies, videos, photographs, etc) can be stored and related. The system also supports the use of a mix of paper-based and digital documents.
 

Talking Titler seeks to incorporate human and technical systems that will provide the right kind of evidence that particular situations demand. The flexibility in the database design allows for bottom up, top down and open-ended evolutionary system design. The latter is critical when developing systems for uncertain situations.

Problems that Talking Titler can assist in Alleviating
In some situations conventional cadastral systems, i.e., land registration and cadastral survey systems, are not adequate to support land tenure security. In many of the cases described below, they do not produce the anticipated outcomes, they tend to fall into disuse, they may be manipulated by powerful elites, or they may not model the de facto situation on the ground adequately. A number of phenomena may underlie this:

• Conventional land registration draws on a model of individual parcels and individualized tenure. In many situations, this is culturally inappropriate where land is held by family groups or lineage groups or where it may not be divided up into individual lots for cultural reasons, or there may be overriding community rights in a parcel which are superior to those of the land holder.
• Registration relies on instruments that might not match the manner in which a situation operates. For example, historically registration depends on written evidence but oral tradition and verbal contracts form the basis of land tenure sytems in many societies.
• Registration is expensive and time consuming, which may prevent poor communities from using and benefitting from it and lead them to use the informal market to conduct land transactions.
• Efficient registration requires well established institutions operating under clear legislative frameworks and following established land administration policies and procedures. These institutions do not always exist, such as in situations of political and social unrest.

The following sub-sections describe typical examples of situations where a system such as the Talking Titler software may be applicable. Each section describes a situation and lists its main characteristics.

1. Post Conflict situations:  post conflict situations are often chaotic and a high level of uncertainty in land tenure and tenure information exists, and often land administration institutions have collapsed. Land administrators often deal with refugees, returning refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) for whom land has to be allocated quickly in order to foster social and political stability and ideally prevent illegal invasins. Furthermore, in these situations, powerful individuals, including new elites and dominant factions, criminal groups (i.e. gangs) and the state itself, may grab public and private land. A long term challenge is land restitution where there may be several overlapping claims to the same parcel or house and the evdence needs to be assimilated in a meaningful way to assume which of these claims are legitimate.
   Availability of tenure information in post-conflict situations is essential as it helps identify the most likely rights holders, and reduce disputes.
2. Customary tenure areas: Customary tenure governs land by custom. Rights derived from custom are regarded as legitimate by the community.  In an idealised form, land is a priceless good and it can not be owned by individuals but rather is vested in the group as a whole, including the family, clan or community. In some societies land is vested in the chief or the traditional leader who holds it in trust for the whole group.

   In some customary tenure systems, processes such as oral traditions, stories, dances, or religious ceremonies as well as cultural icons, such as totems, and artefacts give effect to the land tenure system. Also, land transactions in many customary tenure areas are conducted orally in the form of verbal contractual arrangements. Indeed, the oral traditions and their interpretation constitute an integral part of the customary tenure system and should be includedin any land record system.

   Customary systems are not static and nowadays many evolving customary systems draw on western or other legal practices such as slamic property law. The plural legal systems that emerge in these situations may incorporate a number of contradictions and conflicts.

   One of the greatest threats to customary land systems is that because the land is not registered, state institutions may regard it as vacant and available for disposal and development. Information about the existence of customary

   Tenure agreements may protect legitimate land holders from these pressures.

3. Informal Settlements: approximately one third of the world’s urban population, one billion people, live in slums. Many of these are informal settlements. Informal settlements are complex social systems. Each settlement has its own unique characteristics, some of which are:
   • Tenure practices: within a settlement, land holding is often based on a mixture of both customary and western practices.
   • High competition for land: an individual can seldom move into an informal settlement without some social link within the community itself. Allegiance to a particular group may be necessary to gain access to and remain in the settlement. Powerful cliques and individuals tend to control the tenure system, and may in fact sell land rights in the settlement. Women and minority groups are often the most adversely affected; their security of tenure tends to be dependent on allegiance and patronage.
   • High levels of conflict: conflicts often occur in informal settlements. These conflicts could be between groups within a settlement as they vie for access to power and resources, or between the settlement as a whole and the authorities responsible for land administration. Solidarity and schism are natural and to be expected in these situations.

There is a need for alternative systems to support land tenure security that extend beyond or perhaps differ from conventional and registration and cadastral surveying. Capturing a variety of different data types, which when linked together may create a more complete picture of the tenure system on the ground in a manner that improves the level of social justice may contribute to this objective. A software tool that can link a variety of data types such as conventional titles or deeds, survey plans, reports, maps and similar analogue or digital documents, digital audio files, photographs and video clips is one response to this need. The manner in which data are linked and queried should allow a great deal of flexibility to cater for uncertainties in a situation and in social relationships that may not be apparent at the outset.

What are the possible purposes of the tool/software?

1. As a cadastral system or land record system prototyping tool where different data types and client needs can be simulated and piloted in the system and tested prior to a more rigid design being implemented. Information system design can be based on top-down, bottom-up and open-ended evolutionary approaches. The Talking Titler system can facilitate design using all three approaches. In this way it may augment initiatives such as the Social Tenure domain model. The system can also be used as a design aid in any conventional surveying or registration office and it allows a number of alternative methods of doing things to be tried and tested.
2. As a training tool for novice land record systems operators.
3. As a land tenure record system: with the capacity to evolve from simple to complex models. 
4. As a document management system for agencies such as NGOs, surveyors, lawyers or state organizations including titles offices, surveyor generals’ offices, regularization agencies and land survey firms.
5. As a laptop-based software that can be used in the field to capture data the office.  that can later be extracted to a larger system in

How can the software/tool improve the situation?
The software utilizes recent technological developments in multimedia and storage devices to serve as a land record system that is more comprehensive than conventional registration and cadastral systems. This is achieved by augmenting the conventional written evidence (titles or deeds) with new forms and types of evidence, namely multimedia such as videos and audio recordings.

A land record system that includes more comprehensive and more complete data about land tenure should contribute to improved tenure security. The availability of tenure information (in many forms, written and multimedia) assists in reducing conflicts over land rights and diminishes the incidence of illegal land grabbing. 

Further, the software should be sufficiently flexible to support a vast array of different  types of data. In fact, multimedia incorporates this by its ability to capture  and model anything that is considered very difficult to model such as orally transmitted stories and testimonies of members of vulnerable groups, such as women, describing how they acquire and hold rights in informal settlements. Multimedia also facilitate the creation of as culturally neutral an information system as is possible. Video and audio recordings allow free expression in the local language. Also, flexible data storage, cross linkages and the possibility to interview participants allow the operators using the system to store, link, and manage land tenure records in the system in ways appropriate to each cultural situation and tradition.  This is an improvement over conventional standardized forms of land registration.

History

Back in 2000, a group of researchers from the Geomatics Department of the University of Cape Town visited the village of Algeria, some 230 km north of Cape Town. Equipped with a tripod and a digital video camera, the researchers were part of an innovative pilot project to define, adjudicate and record the land rights of forestry workers who were being granted communal ownership of their land under South Africa’s land reform programme.

One by one, the workers were asked to stand in front of their homes and to read aloud, on camera, an affidavit stating their name, house number and what they perceived to be their rights, interests and obligations regarding the land they occupied. They then took additional information from global positioning system (GPS) surveys to produce graphical representations of the location of land parcels. The researchers then integrated the resulting video film clips and GPS records into a geographical information system (GIS) database of talking title certificates and parcel identifiers for each resident in the village, thus providing a comprehensive official land administration record for the Algeria village communal property association.

The advantages of video were evident from the start. For one, the people who were to benefit from the national land reform and land titling programmes could describe on camera aspects of their land tenure systems that might not normally have been included in written documents, thus improving the completeness of their land records. The video records would be easily understood by all community members, even those with no formal education, and the individuals claiming land rights – and the land they referred to – would be easily recognizable. The process of collecting evidence was relatively cheap and simple. Compared with the cost of hiring skilled personnel to record land tenure information, video cameras are relatively inexpensive and can be operated by the community members themselves after only minimal training.

Following the success of the Algeria project, similar video and data recording techniques have been used to establish rights for individual land parcels in Imizamo Yethu, an informal settlement on the outskirts of Cape Town. Instead of having people prepare affidavits, the researchers conducted structured interviews with their subjects, thus ensuring consistency of the data and video clips of similar length.

More recently, field trials using videos to record evidence of land rights have been conducted in Nigeria in rural land disputes and in urban land regularisation. Discussions with First Nations communities in Canada have also been held to evaluate the usefulness of such a system and to get input into relevant design features.

Recent News
Dr Mike Barry went on a trip to Nigeria recently as part of a project for the British Council’s Security Justice and Growth Programme and the first four site licences of a beta version of the Talking Titler Object Manager software were granted to the Directorate of Land Regularisation in Lagos. Nigeria has a population of more than 130 million people and only 3% of the land is registered.

The software is being used to manage the regularisation records. Regularisation applications include survey plans, application forms and a host of other records. If successful, the applicant can register his or her property. On two previous missions, Mike examined the usefulness of video clips, audio files and digital photographs in the regularisation data packages.
 
On the same trip, the Talking Titler software was used for a two day design and training workshop for staff in the Surveyor General’s office in Enugu. A group of four surveyors completed exercises using a range of records which included videos, photographs, survey plans and titles to input into a database in an integrated form. Survey records are currently in paper form in Enugu and staff were given an insight into how a computerised system might function and how they could use the software to design and create a prototype for this system.
 
In April 2008, Dr Mike Barry and Abdel-Rahman Muhsen visited the Canada Centre for Cadastral Management where they held a two-hour workshop with staff in the office, and licensed four copies of the software to the Surveyor General of Canada.
From left Jim MacKenzie -  Deputy Surveyor General, Mike Barry, Abdel-Rahman Muhsen, Peter Sullivan - Surveyor General of Canada
 

more information

http://www.gltn.net/en/home/land-information-management/talking-titler-object-manager-manual/details.html

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