Cadastres (Land management & publishing tools)

The current Geo Web Cadastre serves as a user agent in two important contexts: claiming/buying land licenses and publishing content to parcels. These tools don’t necessarily have to be combined in a single user interface, but both are core functions of the Geo Web network. This topic will explore ideas to reward builders of these (public good) tools.

The goal for the Geo Web network is not to have one “official” Cadastre built by a core group of contributors, but to instead create incentives for many Cadastres to thrive in an open market. Each can interact with the core land registry protocols and put their own spin on the tools, design, and niche focus to meet market demand.

One way to think of a Cadastre is like your digital real estate agent. It helps you find and secure your dream plot of land. Marketing done by a Cadastre operator may have been the reason that you discovered the Geo Web and decided to become a land owner.

Because of the transactional nature of land claims/purchases and the clear value to the network that each incremental transaction provides, we have a natural opportunity to reward the Cadastre that is used in the claim/purchase (pass an address parameter in the transaction). Think of it like a real estate commission or referral fee.

This can be implemented as a payment stream (which could end when a user transacts with a different Cadastre) or a one-time payment based on the value of the land claimed. This can be done permissionlessly and in a credibly neutral way.

It wouldn’t require a land licensor to pay anything extra to reward the builder of the Cadastre that they are using, but they’d still be “voting” on the allocation of public goods funding.

We hope that this sort of model can support sustainable open-source development of Cadastres without falling into data/attention selling.

This is one of my priorities after we’ve launched on mainnet and have governance/community engagement on the use of treasury funds.

The argument can be made to start working with other projects to integrate the Geo Web Protocol prior to going live on mainnet. The argument is akin to beta-testing: get real world use cases and feedback before you open it up to larger audiences.

Yeah, it’s the chicken-or-the-egg problem. I’ll pitch to anyone who will listen and have some groups/people intrigued by this concept, but it does require a leap of faith for them at this point.

We’d welcome any 3rd party interested in building with open arms (721 Labs? :wink: ). I think this incentive structure can go in as soon someone is committed to giving a Cadastre a run (they could even fork ours). I’d be comfortable doing this before there’s a participatory governance process in place because I think the mechanism is credibly neutral and clearly aligned with value creation on the network. Governance could always tweak it or abolish it later.

Absent that pre-mainnet buy-in, I believe our best path is to stay focused on the core functions and to get launched as soon as possible. Mainnet opens the door for this and other economic incentives to be real and I think that outweighs waiting for a big bang launch.

1 Like