Journal Volume 2 Francophone Local Chapter

Introduction

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

Since October, a huge work in the Francophone mailing list (http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/francophone) has been performed in order to share ideas about the missions of the local chapter. The Francophone local chapter missions are now separated into three main committees : organisation, open geodata and open source software. For each committee, a chair will manage communication between contributors and will 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 and hold 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 has been engaged :

• OSGeo got a booth in an Open Source village at the main geospatial tradeshow in France (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 initiated the translation work of the OSGeo Journal Vol. 1.

Election

As of 6th of July, the first round of the election is finished and a second round to elect the Data Committee leader will start the 9th of July. The first round result is :

• Local chapter president : 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 and to have a start on solid bases.

Poll

A 15 days poll was published at the beginning of June. 54 persons answered the poll. 37 persons out of the 54 had 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 reasonably large amount 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.

OSGeo Journal Vol. 1 Translation

A french translation of OSGeo Journal Vol. 1 is, at the time of 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 finalization appeared to be not so easy. The working process has to be clarified, and a RFC has been drafted for this purpose.

Authors

• Yves Jacolin
• Gwenael Bachelot

Relecture : François Van Der Biest, Vincent Picavet