Re: Presenting PostgreSQLFr.org and its future

Jean-Paul,

> 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.

Great! BTW, do you have any idea whom this "Cit(at)delle" company which owns
postgresql.fr is?

> 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.

Yes. Previously, our French community has been rather small, and French
people are not so interested in joining English-only mailing lists.

> 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.

Looks good.

> 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 :)

Way cool.

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

Yes, although the Advocacy.postgresql.org site will soon be folded into the
general www.postgresql.org. If your members would be willing to
translate, we would be glad to have them.

> * 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,

I would like to work closely with you in this. We are currently working on a
Non-profit Foundation in the United States to support PostgreSQL, and there
should definitely be some official relationship between the two entities.
If it could be made to work, might it be possible to expand your group to an
EU-wide organization, or are you focussed on French-speaking Europe
exclusively?

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

This is something we *need* to coordinate on; it would not do for you and I to
hit up the same company for a donation, seperately. Let's talk.

> - 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.

Actually, if you have some $$ for shipping, I can send you both t-shirts and
books for the next convention (though the books will be somewhat out of
date).

--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco