Belgium

[Georg C. F. Greve]

Hi guys,

 || On Thu, 26 Apr 2001 17:08:17 +0200
 || Anne POSSOZ <Anne.Possoz at epfl.ch> wrote: 

 >> What are the plans of FSFEurope to have an office in Belgium?

The FSF Europe has a central office for all of Europe, because the
office-related stuff can relatively easily be bundled in once place,
which is much more cost-efficient, too.

We definitely do want to have a Belgium chapter, though. There are
some preliminary contacts, but nothing definitive, yet.

We need to finalize setting up our basic structure (we're pretty far
on that) and then we'll expand to other countries. We do have contacts
to Italy (not Alessandro, he is too busy to set up the chapter, but he
will still remain in the FSFE as an advisor), Sweden, Spain, Portugal,
Austria and started establishing contacts to the U.K.

There is a lot of work related to this and we're definitely trying to
work as fast as we can. Doing something right sometimes means not to
hurry it - and we definitely want to do it right.

 >> I ask the question because we've tried to create an Open
 >> Association around Free Software (see OpenBe.org for more info)
 >> but the project is still in StandBy for the moment.

Although we would probably have preferred if it had been called
FreeBe, but from what I have seen with a quick glance at the web site,
it seems like OpenBe might be a good candidate for an FSF Europe
associated organization in Belgium (like APRIL is in France).

 ap> Being a belgian in Switzerland, I would also suggest that the
 ap> division is not by country but also with some share of languages.

I partially agree. We need to be careful not to chop the organization
into too many parts, though.

 ap> In fact, here in Switzerland, collaboration between the 2 parts
 ap> are quite limited due to language. I don't speak-read german and
 ap> some others working in the other side speaks no french nor
 ap> english.

Switzerland is certainly a pretty interesting special case. For a
Swiss chapter I think we will need a chancellor / vice-chancellor pair
that speaks both languages equally well. You were completely right to
bring up this point.

So far there are no special plans for Switzerland (yet), but we
definitely want to be present there, as well.

 ap> For example, I am sure that we could profit to share french
 ap> between part of Belgium, France and part of Switzerland.

Absolutely. A lot of this can be done with coordination between the
chapters by sharing mailing lists. So the people speaking french in
Belgium can share their mailing list with the people in France and
vice versa. 

Regards,
                Georg

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
GNU Business Network                        (http://mailman.gnubiz.org)
Brave GNU World	                           (http://brave-gnu-world.org)
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