Journal Volume 2 Francophone Local Chapter

Introduction

The creation of the OSGeo-fr started in October 2006, following the FOSS4G 2006 meeting in Lausanne. Now in 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 separate into three main committees : organisation, open geodata and open source software. At the top of each of this committee, a leader will manage the communication between contributors, send information to the local chapter about the progress of the project. Some other important details need to be clarify, i.e. how OSGeo-fr is organized (only the main structure is currently drawn), how managing election? 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 times some small project took place like :

• OSGeo got a booth at the main French tradeshow in an Open Source village (see http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/GeoEvenement2007)
• we translated a one page document which presents OSGeo missions and projects
• we ran a poll to know more about people and how did they see the creation of a Francophone local chapter
• we began the translation of the OSGeo Journal Vol. 1.

Here 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 9 of July. The first round result is :

• Local chapter : Yves Jacolin
• Organisation Committee : Gwenael Bachelot
• Software Committee : Vincent Picavet

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

Poll

The poll was published at the beginning of June for 15 days. 54 persons answered to the polls, 37 subscribing in the Francophone mailing list. From the poll results, we understand we will have an important project about OSGeo communication : 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 comitee. However the number of people answering to the poll allow 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 to join us. Finally, the translation of the OSGeo Journal Vol. 1 showed us that we are ready to manage some project and will help to improve the visibility of the OSGeo-fr.

Translation of OSGeo Journal Vol. 1

OSGeo Journal Vol. 1 is, at the time I am 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), 5 persons by proof reading the translated articles. Some of them both translated and read articles. This is the biggest project that the OSGeo-fr managed by itself and some of details of the process needs to be clarified. Managing 27 articles in a process of translating - proof reading - back to the translator for finalisation may not be too easy, so we need to write a RFC to clarify it.

Authors

• Yves Jacolin
• Gwenael Bachelot