It’s not often you come across an organization that has the potential to make a difference. I mean really make a difference. This tiny organization called ‘PLACE’ is one of them.

PLACE first came across my radar when I was contacted by its founder, Peter Rabley, last July.

Peter is a geographer. He was born in Southampton, England which coincidentally is not too far from the Ordnance Survey headquarters. Perhaps that was a signal that he would eventually get involved with mapping.

It turns out Peter and I share a few common threads: during the late 1970s we both suffered through a Roman Catholic boarding school education in England and we both quickly became ex-pats. Not only that: just like me Peter’s first serious involvement with technology was with VAX/VMS mini-computers. But while I fled to Silicon Valley, Peter’s journey was much more exotic.

He spent his youth growing up in the Bahamas and then ended up studying Geography at the University of Michigan. Then in 1984 he headed to the University of Miami to acquire a masters in Economic Geography and GIS. It was while he was at Miami that he got familiar with mapping technology, cutting his teeth on what must have been an excruciatingly painful and early version of Esri’s ARC/INFO.

What? I’m calling early versions of ARC/INFO exotic? No, but wait!

The exotic part was when Peter got a job focusing on urban planning in Washington, DC. From this position he was promptly dispatched to various locales in Pakistan and Nepal. Fast forward a few years and Peter had built expertise in international land management, both from a policy point of view and in the foundational technology used to make it all work efficiently, especially in developing countries.

In 1996 Peter founded International Land Systems (ILS). ILS focused on software and services for property registration and property boundary mapping. And they did this in over 30 countries worldwide: including in China, Ukraine, Ghana and Jamaica as well as in the US, the UK and Germany.

In 2011 ILS got acquired by Thomson Reuters and within a year Peter had left to form another property information venture, this time with a philanthropic organization called the Omidyar Network. In case you’re not familiar, this organization was established by Pierre Omidyar who founded eBay.

By that time Peter had come to realize that a dire lack of information about buildings and properties was holding back urban planning. More importantly it was holding back economic growth. This was particularly the case in developing countries around the world.

At the macro level it all boiled down to one thing: a lack of detailed data about cities, communities and neighborhoods was a serious crimp on the social well being of hundreds of millions of people across whole continents.

But these countries didn’t just need software to manage data. They needed the raw data to power it. And they didn’t have it.

What’s the best way to go about creating this data? Well, guess what folks, it all starts with a map.

It was out of this need that in January 2020 PLACE was born.

PLACE Fundamentals

When Peter founded PLACE he focused relentlessly on the fundamentals. Fundamentals about data. Fundamentals about organizational structure. Fundamentals about incentives. And perhaps most importantly — fundamentals about trust.

PLACE was not just going to be another commercial mapping company. And nor was it going to be another open data organization. PLACE had to be structured in such a way that the organization could produce high quality data efficiently and in volume. This required a ‘back to first principals’ rethink of how data companies are structured, how incentives are aligned and how data is collected and published.

PLACE also had to focus on producing the right kind of data. In peeling the question back to the most atomic level Peter came to realize that in order to build very detailed maps suitable for helping communities grow and prosper you first needed something even more basic: you needed imagery.

But not just any imagery. The kind you could get from commercial satellites just didn’t cut it. You needed something much more HD.

So what did PLACE set out to do?

They made it their mission to collect and publish super high resolution, high-accuracy aerial and street imagery for cities across Africa and small island countries around the world.

This imagery would be the fuel to build the maps. And the maps would be the fuel to stimulate growth and prosperity.

Thinking Different

The beauty of PLACE isn’t so much about the data they collect. It’s about the way they do it.

First: PLACE gives ownership of any data collected in a country to the government of that country. At zero cost.

In return PLACE asks for three things:

• Getting the respective government to provide the necessary licenses and permits to collect the data
• Getting the right to permanently steward the data in the PLACE Trust, a legal data trust based in the UK
• Getting the right to license the data in the PLACE Trust to PLACE Members

PLACE also pledges not to compete with its Members. So they’re not going to build street map data or a land information systems from the imagery. In a sense they’ve taken a leaf out of TSMC’s book. TSMC pledges not to complete with its customers in the silicon chip manufacturing business¹.

All of this aligns the incentives and builds trust.

In return for getting the data at no cost governments are incentivized to provide the necessary approvals to allow the data collection to take place. For example: permits to land and fly specific aircraft or UAVs and notices to ministries of defense, air traffic control and to the police.

Getting these permits is often arduous, costly and time consuming, so incentivizing the governments to provide rapid approval is invaluable. Peter told me a story about another commercial aerial survey company that was kept waiting 110 days for their permits. Can you imagine the cost of having your plane and equipment grounded for almost 4 months? Ouch.

Second: As an organization PLACE is built on a principle of trust:

• Governments are screened and vetted before any data collection agreements are signed.
• Any third parties want to use the data must apply to become a PLACE Member. They also get vetted and screened.
• Terms of Use are subject to the LOCUS Charter, which defines a set of common international principles to support ethical and responsible practice when using location data.
• PLACE Members and governments must abide by these principles and must remain in good standing in order to maintain access to any data in the PLACE Trust. If governments don’t abide then they can say goodbye to any ongoing or future data collection. If PLACE Members don’t abide then they can say goodbye to data access.
• The data is collected by one arm of the PLACE organization called the PLACE Foundation, based in the USA. But the data is stewarded and licensed by a completely different legal entity called the PLACE Trust, based in the UK. In that way the data can continue to be properly protected even in the event of failure of the PLACE Foundation.

Third: The focus is on collecting data the right way, but done fast.

PLACE isn’t just collecting data using a few cheap DJI drones. They focus on photogrammetric rigor using the latest LiDAR and UltraCam aerial cameras. Mounted in Lear jets or Event 38 mapping drones, data can be collected at a rate of up to 5,000 square kilometers per hour.

PLACE’s framework is already proving its value:

In three short years (mostly during the global pandemic) PLACE is quickly gaining traction. They’ve signed agreements with nine countries including Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Turks and Caicos, Anguilla, Malawi and Kenya. Nigeria, with a population of 230 million, is the latest large country to join.

They’re finding that the PLACE framework is disintermediating data collection and eliminating the need for consultants to get the job done. For example no longer do you need someone to help you get permits. The framework’s incentives for governments short circuit all that.

The end result: rapid, high quality data collection that any organization in good standing can quickly put to use.

Show Me the Data

So what does the data look like?

Well, here’s PLACE Aerial data for a street intersection near the Plateau Mosque in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire:

And here’s the equivalent in Google Maps and Apple Maps:

Google and Apple generally strive for the best available commercial satellite data, so you can see that the PLACE Aerial data is significantly higher resolution and thus significantly more useful for determining things like property boundaries, land use, economic activity and population. And of course it’s more than good enough for building a street map.

The PLACE Aerial data has a ground sample distance (GSD) of around 5cm. The is an order of magnitude better than typically available commercial satellite imagery which has a GSD of 40-50cm.

But PLACE doesn’t stop at collecting aerial data. They also collect anonymized street level data. Here’s a sample of PLACE Ground data for Côte d’Ivoire:

Putting PLACE Data to Use

PLACE data is a horizontal bedrock for so many uses: for governments just to be able to create an accurate map of their communities is a godsend. It can form the basis for understanding population and land use. It can be critical to stimulating economic development, administering healthcare and eduction programs or for fairer and more efficient property tax collection.

For commercial organizations the uses are many. In the insurance industry the data can help people understand risks, particularly for flooding. The data is valuable for building construction and financial modeling. And of course the data is a foundation for consumer applications: mapping, wayfinding and business search.

The data can be used to build models — quickly and efficiently — whether it be vulnerability analysis models for flooding or heat from buildings, or transportation models for routing goods or population growth models to benefit urban planning.

And AI is only going to supercharge all this analysis.

In Africa in particular there is a desperate need for all this work. Populations are growing like crazy and economies are growing with it. For example, the population of Malawi is about 22M now but is expected to grow to 110M by 2050.

We should also expect many use cases for the data that people have yet to invent. Remember when iPhone launched in 2007? Who thought of Uber back then?

The same thing is going to happen in Africa. It has a population of 1.2B and the median age is only about 19. And despite what you might think, many of the young un’s are getting a good education — and many are super smart. So young African entrepreneurialism is going to drive growth: Africans creating businesses for Africans.

The potential is awesome. And it’s going to be fascinating to watch how PLACE Data is put to good use.

PLACE’s Biggest Fans

In its three years of existence PLACE has already built a fan base.

Esri is one. Obviously it fits with their secret evil plan of making sure everyone on the planet has an ArcGIS license, but in all fairness it actually perfectly aligns with Jack Dangermond’s sincere goal of wanting to make a difference.

Universities around the world love PLACE data for research as do many well known international agencies.

And then there are the organizations that help governments process data, understand it and gain insights from it. Many of these are development agencies, a.k.a. ‘beltway bandits‘ in Washington, DC or similar organizations in other parts of the world.

And of course AI companies like AtlasAI and Impact Observatory are loving what PLACE is doing.

PLACE has 52 Member organizations at the time of writing and they’re adding about two a week. And they have funding from a number of significant organizations including The Global Innovation Fund, The Dovetail Impact Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Omidyar Network and The Mozilla Foundation.

As word gets out about PLACE I can only imagine that membership and funding will snowball.

How Do You Access PLACE Data?

The PLACE business model is simple.

It’s US$1,000 per year to be a PLACE Member. This is considered tax deductible if you’re a US tax payer. If you’re feeling generous you are free to pay more than $1,000 per year if you’d like. 😉

If you want to use the data for non-profit or not-for-profit purposes then there is nothing more to pay, but PLACE’s preference is that derivative works get published under a Creative Commons license.

For commercial use there is a one-time data license fee for the data. The fee is based on the number of cities that are licensed and there are discounts for multiple cities. Updates for a city are treated like another city. For example, the fee for the data captured of Abidjan in 2024 might be $X. You’d pay $X again for the data captured of Abidjan in 2025.

Commercial licensees are not allowed to sublicense the data as is, but they are allowed to create derivative works and license those works for a fee. There are no revenue share requirements back to PLACE for derivative works.

Where Next for PLACE?

PLACE has achieved a huge amount in the three years they’ve been in existence:

• They’ve signed data collection deals with nine countries, including some large ones like Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria.
• They’ve got alignment with those countries to make sure the governments have the right incentives to work with them.
• With the PLACE Foundation and the PLACE Trust, they’ve got their organizational structures in place that will easily be able to deal with large scale data acquisition.
• They’re getting traction with membership
• They’ve got foundational funding from a number of significant organizations.

But they haven’t quite reached critical mass.

PLACE has yet to put enough data on-the-shelf to generate significant commercial revenue. And so they need more funding to get to that critical mass of data so they can be self sustaining. I’m convinced they’ll get there, but it’s going to take more work — and frankly more cash.

But it’s going to get even more interesting when they do reach critical mass. PLACE already has plans to leverage commercial revenues to subsidize capturing data in areas of need rather than just in areas of interest. In other words: using the licensing revenue they get from licensing data for high growth cities to fund capturing data in poorer areas.

Another interesting sidebar: Peter’s framework for PLACE, particularly its organizational structure built around trust (with the PLACE Foundation and the separate PLACE Trust), together with the built-in incentives and alignment for cooperation has got key people in other industries thinking: could the same model work well for healthcare data or agriculture data? Hmm. There’s a thought.

If you’d like to learn more about PLACE I’d strongly recommend visiting the PLACE website which is at thisisplace.org . Alternatively consider pinging Peter Rabley, Managing Partner of the PLACE Foundation or Denise McKenzie, Managing Partner of the PLACE Trust.

I can’t wait to watch PLACE going forward. I’m sure there will be some great surprises to come…

---

Acknowledgments and Footnotes

Acknowledgments:

My heartfelt thanks to Peter Rabley, Managing Partner of the PLACE Foundation as well as to Denise McKenzie, Managing Partner of the PLACE Trust for taking the time to talk to me and helping me to get to know and understand the PLACE organization.

It should be noted that PLACE took no part in sponsoring this article (and nor did anyone else for that matter).

Footnotes:

1. TSMC is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. They manufacture silicon chips for the likes of Apple, NVIDIA and AMD. From day one they have steadfastly committed not to compete with their customers. According to TSMC: “Our mission is to be the trusted technology and capacity provider of the global logic IC industry for years to come.” ↩︎