Today marks the first public release of the new Terraso platform, the culmination of more than two years of work by the growing Terraso team at Tech Matters. We have worked with co-design partner landscapes across five continents, and thanks to their insight and commitment, Terraso will have the opportunity to aid and guide any landscape towards community-driven pursuit of sustainably integrating the needs of people and planet. Special thanks go to all of our partners at 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People for their inspiration and assistance.
This initial Terraso release provides core account creation and maintenance capabilities: personal accounts, landscape affiliation, and group creation. The concept of a group in Terraso is designed to be very flexible; a group can be a landscape partnership, a clearly defined organization, or any collection of Terraso members who share a common interest (e.g. “Sustainable Coffee Growers”).
The Terraso engineering team, formed in October, has designed and released this first small step toward delivering the Terraso vision. We anticipate that additional features and functions will be added quarterly, based upon the greatest needs of our landscape partners. Coming next is the ability to define your own landscape and access built-in powerful data collection tools like KoBoToolbox from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Later in 2022, we anticipate delivering additional data analysis and visualization tools, especially features to make it easier for landscape partnerships to incorporate critical data into map-based stories.
If you would like to join us in the co-design process and have a voice in the creation of Terraso, please contact us!
Terraso is open source software freely available on GitHub.
Critical funding for Terraso was provided by the Hitz Foundation, IKEA Foundation, The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, and Schmidt Futures.
