For our 20th anniversary, we’re presenting to you all the projects we support that you can help support too if you’re one of the three top winners of our t-shirt design contest.

Above all, though, we just want to highlight some of the projects for the common good that we think you should know about.

The French chapter of OpenStreetMap is the last Gandi-supported project that we’re presenting to you for our 20th anniversary. The last but certainly not least, since OpenStreetMap is a major actor in the decentralization of the internet. The global cartography project they represent is the most supported collaborative project in the world!

We’re giving supported projects center stage for our 20 year anniversary. These projects are the potential beneficiaries of the #PrintMyGandi t-shirt design contest. To create your 20 year collector’s t-shirt, use our t-shirt design software, which provides a selection of pre-made designs, colors, and symbols ready for you to use in your t-shirt design.

The 3 top-voted designers will win 10 copies of their design, of which 500 copies will also be printed and sold on our website. And that’s where the supported projects come into play—all profits generated by the sale of these t-shirts will go to the supported project selected by the creator of the t-shirt in question.

And on top of that, the creator of the most popular design will also win a smarphone, but not just any—a Fairphone, the ethical smartphone.

Who is OpenStreetMap?

OpenStreetMap is a non-profit organization, created in 2004, that collects, diffuses, and uses cartographic data.

The OpenStreetMap project takes up the principles of Wikipedia, the famous free encyclopedia. Each person navigating on the platform can contribute to the collective knowledge of the project, in this case in terms of localization and cartography. As such, each contributor is free to record location information such as opening hours, a modification of the street number, or add a walking path. Updated daily by more than a million contributors around the world, this map has become indispensible. Even more so because it allows the wider public to diffuse and access otherwise unavailable information. For example, OpenStreetMap contains cartographic information about North Korea, information that is not available on it’s less-free counterpart, Google Maps.

Many users are committed to the principle of opposing appropriation by commercial interests of information that society as a whole needs. This is a particular problematic to which OpenStreetMap responds.

Many organizations use geographic data today, whether to inform the public of their operations, their area of activity, or simply their address. But very few use OpenStreetMap rather than Google Maps, who for their part, have no bones about using your data for commercial purposes. But know that OpenStreetMap is the best alternative—free, collaborative, and healthy! Their map editors are super powerful, intuitive, and let you share information in an extraordinarily simple way.

Gandi supports OpenStreetMap

The “Gandi supports” structure exists to support initiatives (principally non-profit organizations) with a goal of contributing to the common good (e.g. to biodiveristy, to animal species, minority populations, etc.) or to promote the development of the free software ecosystem. This support takes the form of a contribution of Gandi products, advice, and experience in order to bring real help in line with the needs of the projects in question. OpenStreetMap is one of those supported projects.

For the French chapter of OpenStreetMap, that support takes the form of the domain name openstreetmap.fr.

If you’d also like to help them, take part in the #PrintMyGandi contest!

Who knows? You could be the one to design the winning t-shirt design and you could give the benefits of your design’s sales to the French chapter of OpenStreetMap (or one of the nine other support projects).

Support OpenStreetMap by making a donation to the French chapter.