Journal Volume 2 Francophone Local Chapter

Introduction
The creation of the Francophone Local Chapter started in October 2006, following the FOSS4G 2006 meeting in Lausanne. As of July 2007, we are close to its creation and sending a proposal to the OSGeo Board (expected in July or August 2007).

Since October, a long work took place in the Francophone mailing list (http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/francophone) in order to share ideas about the missions of the local chapter. Thus, Francophone local chapter missions are separated into three main committees : organisation, open geodata and open source software. At the top of each of this committee, a leader will manage communication between contributors, and send information to the local chapter about the progress of the project.

Some other important details need to be clarified, i.e. how OSGeo-fr is organized (only the main structure is currently drawn), how to manage elections? etc. This is the main purpose of the new local board which has been elected at the end of june (see subsection below).

During this time some small projects took place like :
 * OSGeo got a booth at the main French geospatial tradeshow in an Open Source village (see http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/GeoEvenement2007)
 * we translated a document which presents OSGeo missions and projects,
 * we ran a poll to discover people's motivations and to know whether they would be consumers or actors in the upcoming Francophone local chapter,
 * we began translating the OSGeo Journal Vol. 1.

Here are some details about this last project.

Election
At the time I am writing this article, the first round of the election is finished and a second round to elect the Data Committee leader will begin on the 9th of July. The first round result is :
 * Local chapter : Yves Jacolin
 * Organisation Committee : Gwenael Bachelot
 * Software Committee : Vincent Picavet

The next step aims at writing the proposal for the Francophone Local Chapter creation as well as writing an RFC about the organization of elections and how to manage them. In other words, we need to formalize the structure of the Francophone Local Chapter in order to be efficient.

Poll
The 15 days poll was published at the beginning of June. 54 persons answered the poll, in which 37 have subscribed to the Francophone mailing list.

From the poll results, we realized that communication of the OSGeo missions will be a key point of the future Chapter : what is OSGeo for ? Which project people can be interested in ? ... This could be one of the main purpose of the Francophone Local Chapter organization committee.

The number of answers to this poll allows us to see the creation of the future Francophone local chapter positively. Once this will be done, the visibility of the OSGeo-fr will be greatly improved and we expect to see more contributors joining us.

Finally, the translation of OSGeo Journal Vol. 1 showed us that we are ready to manage projects and this will help to improve OSGeo-fr's visibility.

Translation of OSGeo Journal Vol. 1
OSGeo Journal Vol. 1 is, at the time we are writing this article, close to be published. Only two articles needs to be finalized (proof readers). 7 persons contributed to this project by translating 27 articles (70 pages), and 5 persons by proof reading the translated articles. Some of them both translated and read articles.

This is the biggest project OSGeo-fr managed by itself so far, and some details of the process need to be clarified. Managing 27 articles in a process of translating, proof reading, and back to the translator for finalisation appeared to be not so easy, so we need to write a RFC to clarify it.

Authors

 * Yves Jacolin
 * Gwenael Bachelot

Relecture : François Van Der Biest