Starting in 2009, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and its partners developed GeoNode: web-based, open-source software that enables organizations to easily create catalogs of geospatial data, and that allows users to access, share, and visualize that data. Today, GeoNode is a public good relied on by hundreds of organizations around the world, and which receives a continuously increasing investment from existing and new partners. These partners form the core of a thriving, mutually beneficial ecosystem of users and contributors — an ecosystem that includes NGOs, government agencies from a variety of countries, commercial participants, and motivated individuals.
GFDRR’s investment in GeoNode would be a reasonable amount even viewed strictly as a software development cost: the GeoNode software today represents an approximately 200% return on investment in terms of code written, since the current GeoNode project would most likely have cost $2.0–3.0 million USD if GFDRR had produced it alone as proprietary software, without building an open-source community around the codebase.
