Everybody has a right to know what's happening with the planet: towards a global commons

Since 2004, OpenStreetMap has been the main platform for building an Open Map of the world. More recently, the concept of building geo-information through distributed work and common ownership has led to several inspiring businesses; for example, Mapillary — a street-level imagery platform. However, currently both OpenStreetMap and Mapillary focus only on cities and urban areas. What about the rest of the planet? What about making open global maps of environmental variables such as land cover, land use, climate, soils, vegetation and biodiversity? Several for-profit and not-for-profit organizations have started doing just that, providing platforms to map world land use (https://osmlanduse.org), land cover (https://geo-wiki.org), biodiversity (https://gbif.org), forest dynamics (https://globalforestwatch.org), weather (https://openweathermap.org), and relief/topography (https://opentopography.org), to mention a few. These open data sources are awesome but scattered. Such information could be even more effective if combined into a complete and consistent “OpenLandMap”-type system of the world’s environment. If realized, such a system could be “the place” where anyone could, with Wikipedia-like confidence, track current status and changes in our environment. To contribute to this idea, OpenGeoHub foundation has recently launched a web-mapping app and a data service called “LandGIS”.