Guide to Organizational Commons
Created in 2014, this guide stems from the organizational support component at the heart of a project to support the development of associations and cooperatives within the OpenStreetMap (OSM) free digital mapping community, supported by the Digital Francophonie Directorate (DFN) of the International Organization of La Francophonie (OIF).
Initiated and then refined during workshops held in Burkina Faso and Senegal by members of Les Libres Géographes collective, the guide’s materials aim to provide a freely licensed organizational resource kit to support the launch and/or strengthening of associative and cooperative structures intended not exclusively for individuals and groups active in the OSM project within Francophone countries of the Global South. These projects to structure their OSM activities revolve around the two fundamental pillars of the OSM project’s dynamics: the associative and the economic.
The kit therefore contains generic documents that can be used to draft an action plan, technical and financial reports, a description of a technical proposal or activities, accounting, as well as information on economic practices and examples of existing structures in the OSM field, or even to develop a strategy or digital communication plan.
On the organizational level, following the governance model of OSM and Wikipedia projects, the project facilitates the emergence of national OSM chapters, which are often present in Northern countries but much less so in Southern countries. Economically, the project contributes to the emergence of cooperative structures whose business model integrates all aspects of free geomatics (Geographic Information Systems approaches in mapping and spatial analysis based on free software, OSM, and open data) and which are rooted in the social and solidarity economy. These resources also benefit entrepreneurial initiatives outside the framework of the social and solidarity economy.
The guide is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA v3.0) and is available for download in PDF, ODS, and XLS formats.