Francophone Chapter Report 2012

French Language OSGeo Local Chapter Activity Report 2012

• Period covered by report: Jan-Dec 2012
• Authors: OSGeo-fr local chapter community
• Contact name: Yves Jacolin - president at osgeo.asso.fr
• The French speaking OSGeo Local Chapter had 275 members on the main Mailing list as of April 14th, 2013.

OSGeo-fr is the legal association to represent OSGeo in the French speaking world. We are running, as OSGeo does, as a low capital association and aims to organize code sprints, events and user meeting. We are working also to provide french translation of documentation for all OSGeo project.

Key Accomplishments

• Events
  • We organized QGIS HackFest in april 2012 at Lyon. It was a great success. Four companies sponsored the hackFest : 3Liz, Camptocamp, Oslandia and Services géographiques. More than 30 people attended, working on different topics (WPS and SEXTANTE, QGIS Server, QGIS 1.8, Android Python bindings, mobile GUI, Documentation, OrfeoToolbox provider for Sextante, rasters). Link: http://hub.qgis.org/wiki/quantum-gis/7_QGIS_Developer_Meeting_in_Lyon_2012
• Localizations & Translations
  • Ongoing work on various projects like QGIS, MapServer (still lagging behind from master documentation though), GDAL-OGR.
• Outreach Activities
  • we are trying to share all french speaking blogs in one place, offer workshops in conferences (as «Rencontre SIG La Lettre» held in may 2012 and next june 2013). There is room for improvement with better use of twitter, OSGeo-fr legal website, etc.
• Legal association
  • we have an official headquarter for the association in Paris.
  • Board members are registered at the national level

Areas for Improvement

We need to get new members more involved in our process, specifically to help translating documentation and marketing material. We need to improve all the marketing process and get contact with the whole community to share handouts, liveDVD, etc.

Opportunities to Help

• We need help to organize news events or projects. Contact us if you are interested to help us (and then help you !)
• We hope that more open source GIS related event will be held in French speaking countries.

Outlook for 2013

• We are organising our first francophone conference followed by a code sprint. We chose FROG as the conference FRancophone sur l'Opensource et la Géomatique. The organisation is currently running smoothly and surely, involving new people and getting traction.
• We will give workshops at the «Rencontres SIG La lettre», the main GIS conference in France
• We currently improve the french translation processes for QGIS using transiflex and MapServer and GDAL-OGR.