Monday, June 30, 2008

The Battle of the Forges, Part II: 'And the winner is ...'

Last Friday 27th I attended an OSOR meeting at Brussels, and things have cleared a lot.

OSOR's goal is to become the central observatory and repository of both code and information from and for EU public administrations. It is to be born with the aim of freedom of use, so that most of its tools will be simply of volunteer use. It thus clearly becomes the solution for gisEIEL.

Nevertheless, as Mancomún is devoted to promoting the use of FOSS in Galicia, which is gisEIEL home country, we feel that we should keep our project registered with them. This will introduce a little 'noise' in our managing tools. But anyway! Will try to cope with it!

So, our solution is using just gisEIEL project own collaborative tools, despite what's the language used (be it Galician, Spanish or English), thus building a multilingual environment that we believe that will perfectly fit the actual reality of our target users/collaborators. As an example: at the above mentioned OSOR meeting, at least five different languages were used (English, Spanish, Italian, French and Danish -and maybe also Irish-), despite the fact that English was the official one. And everybody seemed to feel quite comfortable with that situation, moving on-the-fly from a language to another, with total naturality.

So, summarizing: our next steps will hence be:
  • Registering at OSOR
  • Negotiating the (un-)use of Mancomún tools
  • Going on incorporating new members to ourcommunity (by the way: more news will follow on this issue soon)
And the winner is ... (drums sounding): "There's no winner, her Majesty!" (An America's Cup classic :-D)

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