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 summarises the actions undertaken by the Francophone Local Chapter and milestones achieved during year 2007. It covers the period from January to December 2007.

The "Francophone" mailing list has been created in October 2006. First tangible actions have been initiated at the beginning of 2007 and have dealt with the organization of the Local Chapter. At present, the Francophone Local Chapter is close to adopt a legal representation as an official French association with legal status. It will make contribution to the GFOSS French-speaking community easier.

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 people 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 answers were 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 worked a lot on marketing project: presentation of OSGeo-fr and OSGeo, project's presentation and a lot of information. GeoEvenement 2008 tradeshow will show a bigger open source village with more conferences.

2008 : one year to improve our organisation

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

As shown below, our plan for 2008 is more important than the last one:

• Géoévénement 2008, the french tradeshow, with a bigger open source village;
• FOSS4G Francophone, in France;
• work on free data opportunities;
• more translation;
• and much more projects.