Update, April 2021
Almost another year has gone by! It’s been a busy one for us, with a ton of growth and working hard to keep things going in a sustainable, responsible way. We have managed to secure some more funding so that we can sustain operations on an ongoing basis for at least a year or so, so that’s huge for us, and we’re very thankful.
We have had a very busy year, with more news articles than ever and really big spikes in traffic on Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the USA. It took down our site for a while, and we’re working on getting that working better in the future!
A more other updates:
- Significant progress in Research Director work and management
- Addition of a large number of South America territories
- Development of dozens of conversations and partnerships with many different nonprofits and Indigenous organizations
- Website redesign
- Adding numerous translations, including Indigenous translations, to the front page
- More developed donation mechanisms
- Hired a Volunteer Coordinator to help manage all the awesome people who want to help us out
We have quite a few goals for the coming year as well:
- Fulfilling funding responsibilities and exploring new avenues of outreach
- Developing stronger relationships with nations directly
- Engaging with the complexity of mapping Africa and the difficulties associated with mapping that part of the world
- Further development of our research processes and research team
- Finalizing new branding and logo
- Contributing articles and conversations in mapping circles
We have a lot of goals — too many to put here! But we’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts about where we are going or what should be important to us. Thanks for being a part of our journey!
Update, August 2020
For a long time, we neglected to update our roadmap. We will try to be more diligent in the future, so you can stay updated on what’s new and what’s our plan for the near future.
In late 2019, we received our first funding! This was huge and extremely helpful in taking the burden off of our founder and board members. Since then, we’ve been working very hard to grow responsibly and improve the way we’re handling this resource.
We’ve grown enormously — Native-Land.ca receives over 10,000 hits a day, our API is in use by dozens of other applications, and our mobile apps have thousands of downloads. We are so excited for the future!
A few more recent updates from the past year:
- We have hired an Executive Director (Christine McRae)
- We have a new Digital Communications Coordinator (Nadi Jones)
- We have been diligently working on adding more Latin and South American territories to the map
- We have added a Spanish translation on the front page
- We are actively looking to hire Indigenous translators for our front page
- We have developed connections with numerous artistic, historical, educational, and other interested organizations
- Developing better analytics to understand our reach and audience
Some of our major current goals, already underway, include:
- Creating comprehensive policy on good ways to manage sources, competing territory claims, and source-checking — better than we’ve done in the past
- Hiring an Indigenous Research Director to add professionalism and complexity to our mapping research
- Obtaining more funding to help us maintain stability as an organization into the future
- Developing more technological tools (such as Twitter bots and more)
- Having a regular blog posting schedule about issues and developments with the map
- A new website design and branding
- Applying for Charitable Status
- Developing processes to manage volunteers and direct efforts
- Undertaking donation drives
- Developing curriculum for teachers and educators on land and land acknowledgements
We are amazed at the reach and influence of Native Land, and awed by the response from the community. We hope that we can keep improving over time and that you can be a part of our journey, too. Please let us know if there are areas where we can improve and do better, and we will promise to keep working hard!