By Harriet Blake

Drill, baby, drill may be what’s on the minds of gas companies, but if you’re a landowner of a potential gas site, you probably have a lot of questions.

Thanks to a new software application that’s being test marketed by MIT, landowners may now extract data to see if the gas companies’ proposals to drill are fair and safe. The software tool, called the Landman Report Card (LRC), will help landowners in any state navigate the government and corporate databases, as well as get feedback from other landowners who’ve been in similar situations. And they can do all this before agreeing to a drilling contract.

The term “land man” refers to an oil company representative who often times shows up on the doorstep of unsuspecting property owners who’ve been targeted as having prospective drill sites.

“People often will sign the day the land man shows up at the door,” says MIT professor Chris Csikszentmihalyi. “There are lots of negotiations that people can do, that they often don’t know they can.”

Csikszentmihalyi , co-director of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, and Sara Wylie, a grad student in the Science , Technology and Society Program, are the directors of the Landman Report Card project, which is coming to fruition just as natural gas exploration in America gains traction as a potential energy source that doesn’t rely on foreign oil — affecting land and homeowners from New York to Texas to the Rocky Mountains states.

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