Some of the best things that happen in the OpenStreetMap community are small: micro-mapping contributions from around the world, a Saturday mapping party, an editathon to improve OSM Wiki, or a hackathon to fix issues on some of the tools that we use. Most of them run on volunteer time and can occasionally stall for the need of a venue, or a few hours of internet. When we asked at the 2026 Local Chapters and Communities Congress what makes it hard to sustain a local community, the most common answer was time and money.
The Local Chapters and Communities Working Group is launching the 2026 Community Microgrants to help with that. We have set aside a total of €5000 that will be distributed to various OpenStreetMap communities in grants of up to €500. Applications are open from 5 October to 25 October.
These are deliberately small grants for small, concrete activities like a mapathon, a one-day field mapping project, a validation sprint, a workshop with a local school or university group, or documentation translation. We’re less likely to fund conference travel, salaries, paid mapping, or recurring costs. Please review the full microgrant guidelines on the OSM Wiki.
Applying is quick. Go to the Microgrants wiki page, type a short project name into the input box under “Start an application”, and you’ll get a page ready to fill in that includes your budget. Grants are up to €500, but we request that you only ask for what your activity actually costs. Most won’t need the full amount, and the smaller the requests, the more communities we can support. These grants are for groups rather than individuals: local OSM communities, Local Chapters, YouthMappers chapters, and similar. We recommend discussing plans with your community first to avoid having multiple applications from the same group.
If you can’t edit the wiki, email your application to local@osmfoundation.org before the deadline and we’ll post it for you!
We’ll announce the results in the first week of November, and funded activities can run from mid-November 2026 to March 2027. Questions are welcome on the Discourse thread or at local@osmfoundation.org.
Header image (left to right, top to bottom): Mapbeks mapping party in Metro Manila, Philippines (2019, public domain); field mapping in Dakar, Senegal (2014, public domain); mapping party in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil (2014, Raylton P. Sousa, CC BY-SA 3.0); school mapping party in Giengen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany (2015, Klaus-Dieter Keller, CC BY-SA 4.0).
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