Founder of Alliance of Cartography OÜ

My name is Alexis. I am a French mapper active on OpenStreetMap since early 2022 and a member of the OSM Foundation since mid-2023. In 2026 I founded Alliance of Cartography OÜ, an Estonian-registered geospatial intelligence firm that builds on the open mapping ecosystem to deliver geographic data products and GIS consulting services to institutional and corporate clients. What began as a personal conviction about the power of open geographic knowledge has grown into a structured commercial effort to put that conviction to work at scale.

I came to mapping not through a technical background but through a belief that maps are one of the most underleveraged instruments of development available to us. Geographic data shapes how resources are allocated, how infrastructure is planned, how emergencies are managed, and how communities are seen or overlooked by the institutions that are supposed to serve them. In regions where commercial mapping providers have little financial incentive to invest, entire populations operate in a kind of geographic darkness. OpenStreetMap exists precisely to correct that, and it is the community behind it that makes the correction possible.

The Philippines has been the primary theater of my mapping work and the place where my understanding of open data matured from theory into practice. Mapping here is never abstract. Every road traced, every building footprint added, every barangay properly placed on the map has a tangible downstream effect on how communities are reached during typhoons, how local businesses are found, how development organizations plan their programs, and how people navigate a landscape that commercial providers have historically under-served. Even as a foreigner, I found that contributing to the map of a place you care about creates a form of engagement with that community that is difficult to replicate through any other means. The Philippines holds a deep personal significance for me, and that significance has never left my work.

That ground-level experience directly shaped the way Alliance of Cartography OÜ was built. The company is structured around the understanding that the most valuable geographic data is not produced by algorithms alone. It is produced when automated processing is combined with the knowledge of people who actually live and work in the territory being mapped. Our operational model reflects this. We use machine learning assisted pipelines to handle the initial classification of geographic areas at scale, and we engage regional subcontractors, registered local firms and operators, to perform the quality assurance and validation work that turns automated output into something genuinely reliable. That validation layer is not a checkbox. It is the core of what makes our data products worth anything to a client who needs to make real decisions based on them.

The relationship between Alliance of Cartography OÜ and the OpenStreetMap ecosystem is one I take seriously. Our commercial contracts are structured so that non-proprietary outputs, data that clients do not require to be kept confidential, are contributed back to the OpenStreetMap public domain. This is not a marketing gesture. It is a deliberate architectural decision that reflects a belief that the commons should be strengthened by commercial activity rather than extracted from it. Where our work produces data that belongs to everyone, it goes back to everyone.

Beyond the data itself, I am committed to ensuring that the local mappers and validation specialists who make our work possible are compensated as the professionals they are. One of the structural problems with how geographic data has historically been produced in the development sector is the normalization of volunteer or near-volunteer labor from communities in the global south to produce datasets that are then monetized or institutionalized elsewhere. Alliance of Cartography OÜ is built explicitly to reject that model. Our subcontractors are engaged through formal commercial agreements, paid against verified deliverables, and treated as technical partners rather than a cheap labor input.

My contributions to the CoMaps project remain an important part of my mapping practice, and I encourage anyone reading this profile to visit their website and explore what they are building. The broader open mapping movement is larger than any single platform or organization, and CoMaps represents a direction in that movement that I find genuinely worth supporting.

I am excited to continue growing both as an individual contributor to OpenStreetMap and as someone building institutional infrastructure that can channel real resources into the open mapping ecosystem. The two are not in tension. Done right, they reinforce each other. Geographic data belongs to everyone, and the work of making that true continues every day.

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Contributions

Wikimedia Commons Contributions

CoMaps Website