Hi all, Arnulf, thanks for explanations, this is the answer I was looking for.
I think I never formally introduced our group so here it is. I hope this will be an interesting read for some of you. I want to emphasise that a lot of efforts and time spent is required to bring such community to life and take its niche. But I hope our experience, though very country-specific can be helpful. We've build virtual non-commercial GIS/RS community that became first place to look for GIS/RS field related information in Russia and around, mainly of technical nature, but more and more on general topics either. We're not officially registered and at the moment consider such status as a rather an impediment than benefit overall. We operate under a main principle that community should not advocate any particular brand or type of software, though some of its members are passionate about one or another (myself included). We are online since 2002 and since then created about 400 articles, various education materials, documentation, data, training etc. Regarding OS software we focused our efforts on 3 things: 1) Translation, we've translated manuals for gvSIG, GRASS, MapServer, PostGIS (QGIS is underway), 2) i18n, we've localized gvSIG, GRASS, QGIS, Geoserver, 3) Data - very critical issue, we've focused on creating really free datasets like a localized database on populated places, translation of GNS and alike 4) Tools support - we contribute to several tools that we actively use: QGIS (including programming), other OS tools - bugreporting 5) Articles-articles-articles, overwhelmingly using OS software lately. Overall our goal is to provide a framework for collaboration and discussion, focusing on independecy and solid results. We have around 2000 (1+ posts) registered users at our forum, similar number of subscribers of our maillist and around 3000 hits every day. Of course the core group is smaller ;) Finally and that is why I enquired about non-OSGeo groups. We are willing to collaborate with OSGeo in all ways possible and will continue our work in this field regardless of what organizational form it will take again stressing vendor-type free concept. Wow, that was a long email and it was fun trying to summarize everything we've done in few words :) Maxim ACO> On Wed, September 30, 2009 18:49, Maxim Dubinin wrote: >> Hi >> >> >> Local OSGeo chapters are great, but how about existing non-OSGeo groups? >> Does OSGeo have a strategy to >> build communication with them? >> >> Maxim ACO> Maxim, ACO> yes, OSGeo's intent it to embrace and support existing organizations with ACO> the same vision instead of being exclusive. There is a Wiki page with some ACO> links and always happy to be updated: ACO> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Like_Minded_Regional_Organizations ACO> Please also feel free to introduce OSGeo to organizations that have not ACO> yet stumbled across us. ACO> In Germany the existing Free Software Geospatial organization FOSSGIS e.V. ACO> (then named "GRASS user's group") meanwhile has become the official OSGeo ACO> Local Chapter and we are working on the same goals and appear jointly at ACO> conferences, trade fairs, organize hack sprints, etc. It is a lively ACO> community and growing strong. It did take some time to work out the ACO> details as is always the case with integrating existing organizations but ACO> now all seem to be quite happy with it. ACO> Best regards, ACO> Arnulf. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
