From 28th April to 1st May 2026, I attended the Geospatial World Forum (GWF) 2026, representing the OpenStreetMap Foundation. The GWF is an annual forum attended mostly by companies and public administration delegates in the geospatial domain. Henk Hoff, all the way back in 2013, was the last OSMF representative attending the GWF, when we received the award for “Geospatial Content Organisation of the year 2012”. So it was long overdue that OSM’s voice could be heard in this professional setting.
Aarti Holla-Maini, United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, speaking at the Opening Plenary.
Own picture under CC-BY 4.0
This year’s theme was Sovereignty, Economy, Society. A theme greatly fitting to OSM’s mission: to collaboratively create open geospatial data, by everyone and for everyone. Data that allows reuse -including commercially-, and which runs on open source software. The forum included several days of talks and panels, and a tech and exhibition fair, where companies and governments could showcase their solutions and make business deals. OSM is integral to the solutions of many of the companies exhibiting, so directly talking with representatives of these organizations is relevant, to explain how important it is to contribute back to the ecosystem, so it can be kept sustainable over time.
Sovereignty, but not isolation, was one of the main ideas mentioned during the event. As we need to collaborate in an evolving and uncertain world, both politically and also technologically with the rise of AI agents, while keeping the infrastructure that powers so many use cases up and running, and stable for the years to come. OSM and the open-source software that powers it can be key to this, as shown by the recent decision by the French government to use a fork of OSM’s core infrastructure as its choice to renew the technology powering its Cadastral systems.
“OSM is more vibrant the more diverse its community is”, this is the main idea I shared at the panel I took part in. A panel that, paradogically, could and should have been more diverse. We need more, and more diverse, people and organizations to know how important it is to contribute to OSM and its ecosystem, so we can together build an accurate representation of our world. Contribution to the ecosystem does come in various forms: data, resources (people, money, time), community building, improving the technology that powers the project, and more. In that sense, communication goes a long way, and it is something that we are improving on at the Foundation, and we should keep aiming for. Thanks to Geospatial World for allowing us to participate in the forum, so the OpenStreetMap voice could be heard in these professional events.
Own picture under CC-BY 4.0
