Handbook of Free Geomatics and Open Data

This guide in French draws on the experience of its collective of authors and contributors: “traditional” geomaticians who have worked in both the Global North and South in both “normal” and crisis-related operational contexts within various organizations representing the professional geomatics sector (local governments, academic teaching and research institutions, international organizations), they have been engaged since 2010 in the field of applications of neo-cartography and neo-geography approaches integrated into the open-source and open-data movements applied to territories in the Global South, in contexts of development support and humanitarian action (preparation for and response to crisis situations).

With support from the OIF-DFEN, in support of the training and outreach programs coordinated by the Libres Géographes collective in French-speaking countries of the Global South since 2013, the “Handbook of Free Geomatics and Open Data” was designed and written from the perspective of emerging actors in Geomatics 2.0 in French-speaking countries of the Global South, particularly those lacking any theoretical or practical knowledge of geomatics but possessing strong practical “neo-cartographic” skills, particularly those acquired through the OpenStreetMap (OSM) citizen-led, participatory, and free mapping project.

The goal of this guide is to mobilize and strengthen these skills in order to foster the emergence of communities of local OSM mappers capable of building relationships with all stakeholders in the geomatics field. By putting itself in the shoes of these French-speaking OSM contributors from the Global South, it offers a self-guided theoretical and practical learning path focused on the practices and resources of the OSM project and their reuse in free mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) using the software QGIS and in Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) through the Infrastructure Francophone Libre (IFL) based on the geOrchestra open-source Spatial Data Infrastructure.

The guide is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA v3.0), available as downloadable PDF and ZIP files.