Francophone Chapter Report 2007

= Francophone Chapter Report 2007 =

Contact: Yves Jacolin (President of the Francophone Local Chapter)

OSGeo-fr Board: Gwenael Bachelot, Vincent Picavet, François Van Der Biest

Introduction
This report aims at showing what Francophone Local Chapter achieved in 2007. The Francophone mailing list has been created in October 2006 and our first actions began in 2007 by discussing about the organization of the Local Chapter. Currently, we are close to being a true legal organization tackling GFOSS subjects. This doesn't mean nothing has been done yet, instead, it should easier from now on to contribute to the GFOSS Francophone Community.

This report covers the period from January to December 2007.

2007: one year to create the Francophone local chapter
After joining into the mailing list, it was necessary to organize ourselves:
 * local chapter structure: who manages the local chapter? how ?
 * write clearly on the wiki our goals
 * how could we organize ourselves and who could join the local chapter

This was not easy but OSGeo Guidelines and OSGeo organization helped us a lot: most questions were the same for all of us, and so the answer was always similar. We are now organized in three committees: free organization, free data and free software committee. A Board with 4 people has been elected, which manages the Francophone Local Chapter projects. For time-consuming projects, a dedicated manager can be elected by the board.

In September 2007, OSGeo Board accepted the Francophone Local chapter proposal.

Actions in 2007 focused on OSGeo visibility in Francophone countries, aka marketing missions. Three mains actions have been undertaken: two tradeshows and the translation of the OSGeo journal. The first two volumes are now published and can be downloaded from the Journal home page.

With two tradeshows (Geoevenement 2007 and GeoTunis 2007), OSGeo-fr ...

2008: one year to improve our organisation
any weaknesses in process, software, management, etc. that you plan to address or recognise need some help

This year, as we already said, we would like to finalize the creation of the legal OSGeo Francophone association. This will help us manage sponsorship, organize events in the name of a legal entity, plus many other benefits. We would also like to improve our internal processes, by creating working groups on specific subjects such as translation, event organization, sponsorship, and so on.

To finish with, we compiled a list of actions for 2008, which will be put to vote, so as to determine the most important of them. The result will be our roadmap for 2008 !

Conclusion
Our plans :
 * Géoévénement 2008
 * FOSS4G Francophone, in France.
 * Keep contact with others associations (as : xxx, YYY)

Opportunities to Help


 * list areas that could use some help from members and readers of the report
 * this is the motivational part that is meant to inspire readers to keep their eyes open for great stuff in 2008 :)