The Gandi Community

For our 20th anniversary, Gandi supports Tela Botanica

For our 20th anniversary, we’re shining a spotlight on our Gandi Supports partners.

These projects will be the main benefactors of our Gandi 20th anniversary collector t-shirt design contest, using the hashtag #PrintMyGandi.

The three winners of the t-shirt design contest will each get 10 copies of their design and will each choose the project to which proceeds from the sale of their design will go, from among the Gandi supports projects partnering with us for our 20th anniversary.

What’s more, the top winner of the contest will also win a Fairphone, the ethical phone that cares for the environment and the well-being of its inhabitants.

Who is Tela Botanica?

Context

The Tela Botanica network is an association that came into being in 1999 for the purposes of supporting the revival of botany in the French-speaking world. It was actually formed in response to the finding that field botany—otherwise known as fundamental botany—that the association was created. Tela Botanica works so that this type of study takes its place of privilege among all of the various fields associated with understanding plant life like floristics, systematics, taxonomy, phytosociology, phytogeography, corology, plant ecology, ethnobotany, etc.

For Tela Botanica, field botany is a fundamental science necessary for each point of view and notably required for essential fields for human flourishing such as agriculture, the food industry, pharmacology, biotechnology, ecology, the protection of the environment, etc.

It’s especially in bearing witness to the growing importance of questions related to the protection of the resources of the planet Earth and the growing concern for sustainable land use that Tela Botanica has woven its network of botanists.

The functioning of the network

The Tela Botanica network is open to everyone who is involved—whether directly or indirectly—in botany, environmental ethics, and respect of humanity. Today, more than 48,000 Tela-Botanists contribute to the growing platform.

The goal of this network is to open a space for all botanists to exchange news and information and to encourage each other to take on new projects thanks to new communications technology.

The association also harvests various freely available scientific data in the public domain for the benefit of everyone. Thanks to this information, it’s possible to learn to identify a plant and to get started in botany thanks to  pedagogical tools like MOOC, an online beginners’ training in botany open to everyone. All of this can be found for free on their site.

The operation of this platform rests on the logic and ethics of collaborative networks and the mode of participation of members as well as the use of information and communications technology to support interactions between members via their online French-speaking botany interface.

This network is free and open for all to access. It can operate that way because all the software and applications for the Tela Botanica network are under an open source license.

Supported project

The goal of the Gandi supports program is to support projects (principally from assocations and NGOs) that work for the common good (the planet, animals, minorities, etc.) or to promote the free software industry. This support translates into assistance in the form of Gandi products, advice, and experience in order to bring real help in accordance with the needs of the project in question. Tela Botanica is part of our supported projects.

Today our support translates into providing cloud computing storage.

If you also want to contribute to the Tela Botanica cause, let your creativity run wild, design the Gandi 20th anniversary collector t-shirt, and share it on Twitter using the hashtag #PrintMyGandi. You have until April 3 to participate!

Five hundred copies of the top three most popular designs on Twitter (as measured in Likes and Retweets) with benefits going to the supported project chosen by each of the winners.

And more concretely, you can help Tela Botanica by making a donation on their site and by contributing (for free).