Hi everyone,
I just want to share a small and experimental project that I worked on, mostly during the first months of 2025.
I was interested in the subject of housing cooperatives, especially as finding accommodation at a fair price can be hard those days. And you might have heard that it’s the year of the cooperative (according to the UN).
My initial question was how can I find all the cooperatives near me (It turns out that I’ve found out a bit later after starting this project that a cluster map exists, but using Google Maps…). I wanted to think how could we categorize those kinds of buildings in OSM and how far can we add details to them. I also wanted to explore the idea to use a repository and some CI actions (here I’m using Github, but it could have been Codeberg) to prepare a dataset that would be automatically updated every week and that could be directly usable by some owners (of cooperatives for example), let’s say on their website and easily watch for any changes on their dataset.
I became a bit addicted and mapped 94 cooperatives and 876 buildings so far. Not everything is perfect, I used mostly public data from the websites of the owner or some local information (in Lausanne, for example, the SCHL has some shield on their building with a lot of details, even more than on their website curiously).
Here is the link to the repository with all the details and more links about the subject of housing cooperative:
Cheers,
Loïc