01
The value of data, if distributed fairly, is an incentive for transparency.
Useful knowledge is costly to compile and too often brings little benefit to the people who hold it. Let those people control its use and share in its value, and careful documentation becomes worth doing. Better decisions and greater transparency can follow from the same incentive.
The knowledge exists. The decisions that depend on it are made without it.
Local knowledge sits in people’s experience, paper files and disconnected systems. The organisations making decisions about those places often cannot find it, compare it or establish what it supports.
A buyer repeats an assessment. A programme cannot establish its baseline. A researcher has to reconstruct who did what, where. The gap is not simply missing data: it is the missing connection between the people who know and the people who need to decide.
Where nothing can be verified, honest and dishonest trade at the same price.
Specific needs no longer require starting from scratch.
Infrastructure
Digital systems that do not fit the work.
Information
Information that is scarce and hard to get.
Opportunity
Local knowledge that could support better decisions.
DAAC focuses on places where information is hard to obtain and existing systems do not meet local needs. Geography is a consequence of those conditions, not the definition of the market.
Reusable frameworks and workflows make it possible to build for a specific operation without paying for every common part again. The system can fit the people using it and still connect to systems elsewhere.
A better account of what is there can change the judgement made from a place’s reputation alone.
02
Local civil society participation
03
Crowdsourced KYC
04
Frontier-market investment
05
Banking the unbanked
06
In-country research
07
Community interventions
08
Artisanal mining
09
Small-scale farming
10
Targeted market research
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Off-grid and mini-grid energy
12
Conservation projects
13
Indigenous and community land & forest management
14
Refugee and displaced-population economies
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Grassroots disaster preparedness
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Smallholder fisheries & aquaculture
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Pastoralist livestock economies
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Community-based tourism
Different decisions need evidence from the same ground.
A buyer needs to understand its supply. A financier needs to assess an operation. A programme needs to measure a change. Their questions differ, but the evidence often concerns the same people, places and activities.
Today those questions trigger separate visits, forms and reports. Information collected for one purpose rarely reaches the next person who could use it. Connecting the evidence lets each decision build on work already done.
An AI assistant needs that connection too. A useful answer must be traceable to the sources it relies on, with uncertainty visible and access governed by the holder.
The opportunity is to make local evidence useful to everyone authorised to use it.
Who needs the evidence
01
Commodity traders & off-takers
Supply-security intelligence to price and commit to frontier supply.
02
Capital allocators
Evidence about operations and conditions to assess an investment.
03
Insurers & reinsurers
Assessing risk where reliable evidence is difficult to obtain.
04
AI labs & data platforms
Information about people and places poorly represented in available datasets.
05
Satellite & remote sensing
Ground-truth labels to validate what imagery can only infer.
06
Compliance
Checking sourcing claims and documenting the evidence behind a decision.
A shared reference lets a question follow the same subject across different sources. This illustration shows that discovery process: recognise the subject, find what each source holds, and bring the evidence into view. Access to the underlying information remains a separate decision.
DAAC · discoveryScattered
SCANNING FIELD
SCATTERED · UNINDEXED
NzibiraSouth Kivu, DRC
Open web · 0→0 sources · 0 data points
Scattered across the web, or never digitised. Now findable.
Value realised, not extracted.
The exchangethe market
A holder decides how their information can be discovered, accessed and reused. DAAC brokers the connection with those who need it, without taking custody. The holder can realise value from the knowledge they have compiled.
- Discovery for a record that never had a public address
- Permissioning that always resolves to the holder’s own terms
- Nothing changes hands until the holder allows it
The railsthe infrastructure
Spine, Frame, Forge, Scribe and Crawl carry the weight underneath, so the exchange above can be trusted rather than improvised: discovery, conformance, exchange and the public record, built once and shared by everyone who builds on them.
- A shared protocol across participating systems
- Conformance that makes an origin record comparable anywhere it travels
- Public evidence connected to the people, places and activities it describes
Useful at the source
Capture for the work
Start with information that helps the people compiling it run their own operation.
Comparable across systems
Connect the evidence
Use common references to recognise the same subjects without flattening the differences between sources.
Shared on agreed terms
Let value reach the holder
Make useful knowledge discoverable and give its holder a reason to keep documenting it.
As more people can reuse the evidence, careful documentation becomes useful beyond the first transaction. The shared reference grows while each holder retains their own record.
The reference database for the unindexed world, owned by the people who build it.
The ambition is a connected reference for places and activities that are poorly understood, compiled by the people who know them. Their knowledge becomes easier to find and use while ownership stays with them.
The people closest to an operation have a view that an occasional visit cannot replace. Useful digital tools give that knowledge a form others can recognise.
Hubs add public context. Connected systems make relevant information discoverable. Agreed terms let the holder choose when that knowledge serves another decision.
What that becomes
The index of the unindexedA shared reference for subjects that are poorly documented, built from local knowledge and public evidence.
Supply that stays sovereignThe people and organisations who hold the ground truth compile records they own, see where each one goes, and earn from it.
One record, many buyersThe same evidence can support several decisions, with each use governed by its holder.
Bring the question closer to the people who know.
Tell us what you need to understand, who holds part of the answer and what stands in the way. That is where the work starts.