GeoCommons
Strenghtening the open geospatial commons
More about: Who is behind this?
GeoCommons is a new grantmaking programme led by NLnet that will be handing out grants directly to researchers and developers working on geospatial commons. The programme represents the single largest investment in Europe to date into the bottom-up development of technology commons in geoinformation, geodetic and geoinformatic engineering. This investment serves two simultaneous goals: to advance the state of the art in geospatial technologies, and to strengthen European competitiveness in the environmental and Earth Observation service industry - and beyond.
The GeoCommons programme will run until at least 2030, and is to be executed by an international consortium of twelve partners from five different countries led by the Netherlands based not-for-profit NLnet Foundation. Partners include the recently established European branch of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), Radically Open Security, Commons Caretakers, Free Software Foundation Europe, NixOS, OW2, Tolerant Networks, Center for the Cultivation of Technology, HAN University of Applied Sciences, Non-Profit Ventures, and Europe's FOSS business association APELL. Additional support will come from the Open Geospatial Consortium and the German Institut für Rechtsfragen der Freien und Open Source Software (ifrOSS).
The first call of GeoCommons will open up still in 2026. This fund is currently being set up, more soon.
Acknowledgements
GeoCommons is made possible with financial support from the European Commission through Horizon Europe grant agreement No. 101343848.
