Presenting PostgreSQLFr.org and its future

Hi all,

First of all, I apologize to not have been in this mailing list before :)

Well, I met Bruce Momjian at Linux Solutions 2004 in february 6. On the 7th,
while I got back home, I dediced to buy postgresqlfr.org domain, with the idea
to set up a French Community for PostgreSQL.

The web site started in 8th february, with few pages on it. What I had in mind
is that many IT pros in France were hesitating in migrate from proprietary RDBMS
to PostgreSQL.

Since I was a consultant in RDBMS (mainly PG!) in an Open Source company for
2 years, I have some relationships with IT Pros that already migrated to PG. I
asked them to fill a questionnaire, what few did.

After that, we started to test Drupal (drupal.org), one of the few serious CMS
that supports PostgreSQL. Finaly our site is 100% Drupal powered and it suits
our needs.

We have now 120+ registered users, the web site has 50K hits a month, with 5K
different people (awstats). So we are proud of this success. A few months ago,
the link on postgresql.org to our Fr site boosted clearly our site. :-)

We translate and post there yet every mail of the pgsql-announce ML. Plus some
do write articles about precise technical matters. For example, the usage of
python embedded in PG, or Slony tests, etc.

But overall, the *most* seen pages are still those about IT Pros testimonials.
since the "book" (drupal term to designate collated pages/articles) has been
setted up (a month..), it has been read 600+ times, printed 400+ times (exported
in plain text). I think those testimonials serve a lot IT Pros that want to
convince their hierarchy that time has come to migrate to PG :)

This encourage us to keep the web site up to date!

We wonder too that it could be interesting for the advocacy.postgresq.org site
to translate testimonials to english.

The future:

* we're planning to set up an "association": its a french legal term to
designate people that join to work together, but for non profite purpose.
Typically, to serve others, like a humanist matter. This allows to have a bak
account, and manage money a bit: when someone donates (sometimes
state/region/city support it too), the money goes to this account, managed by a
few representants (president, secretary, and treasurer). This method give also
all the transparency that we want, and protects every person in it legally,

* when this is done, we'll look for partenership of commercial entities, or
governemental ones. Because we need cash for the following:

- the web site is planted on a friend's OpenBrick : he paid alone the machine
and he's still paying gently for us the hosting. This is not a way to work
for us.=> having money to buy a server and hosting it

- we'll have a booth at Linux Solutions 2005: we need to buy posters and
tshirts to make the booth sympathetic (sourcewear.com) Im planning to ask
O'Reilly and
Eyrolles (eyrolles recently migrated its web commercial site to PG and
added a testimonial to pgfr.org!...) to let books about PG in the booth.

Okay, I almost said here what I wanted to inform advocacy people about.

Any idea or support would be much appreciated. Thanks a lot!

--
Site perso : http://www.argudo.org
PostgreSQL : http://www.postgresqlfr.org
l'APRIL : http://www.april.org