Call it Communauté

Community! However you spell it, it's important in virtual worlds.

Nadajdae region on OSgrid is home to Hella Yver and her partner Badr Norseman, and recently they've decided to open up the sim to social events for the Francophone community.

A little opensim history, which you probably know already. 

FrancoGrid was the best-known French grid, and arguably the oldest, it started in February 2007, and closed in March 2022 when the servers suffered an irreversible breakdown and the FG committee came to the sad decision that the grid was no longer viable. Just over a year later Metropolis Grid, the giant in the family of German-speaking grids, finally went offline (you may remember the wonderful party we had to mark the end of that era!). 

Metro and Franco - these two gaps in the Opensim scenery, not to mention Osgrid's 8 month 'hiccup' in 2014, brought home to most people that probably, the way forward was  to have lots of smaller grids, where people can do their own thing, and comfortably avoid people who have different ideas and uses for virtual worlds.

But little grids, though they lead to less drama, also fracture the community, making it less likely and less easy to stay in touch.

If you read this blog often, you already know of quite a few Frenchies in OSGrid - from the lovely Paela Argus, who for many years served the OSGrid community as an active admin member; Ange Menges and nani Ferguson are here, with their signature Hunt builds three times a year; and there's Cheops Forlife of course, with the Theatre d'Adret; not to mention the delicious Cherry Manga who has sims here and on many other grids. That's just to mention a few of the better known folks on OSGrid - there are many more, plus a whole archipelago of Francophone grids out there, many of which we have visited, from Ignis, to Creanovale, to Logicamp, to Vibel, to Atlas and more. Wondering where the other French grids and French creators are located? Well, Prodyck Theas has compiled a useful list on Artefactix, his interesting blog, you can see the grid list here.

Prodyck Theas on his sim Ipsofacto OS on Osgrid

Over the years, there have been some valuable projects to knit the French speaking community together, including Vladimir Djannovic's fantastic tour group Virtual Discovery (here's an example of one of his trips).  Those trips have been discontinued, but another great innovation in recent years is Francopholie, a minigrid set up by Minord Loup and friends, as a place where French speakers can get info about the community, and also leave info, so that newcomers can find their way to the Gallic parts of our hyperverse. 

There's a French group in OSW, and an even bigger french group in Discord. And of course, for quite a while, Eden Cat organized the Soirees Franco, These were monthly get-togethers that included some sightseeing as well as a chance to catch up with friends, ask questions, and find solutions to problems. Eden is the best! However, it's been some time since those monthly meetups were held. So there is room for a new initiative.

Nadajdae region on OSgrid 

Badr Norseman: Some time ago Hella opened up Nadajdae to have events, we both talked about it and came up with the idea to organise meetings where people could gather and socialize together enjoying good music and company. After Francogrid closed you felt like if would be nice to do so for the French community. That was how the idea was born.  Last Friday we opened up for the first time and it was a nice event.

 Hella Yver: The projects are born mainly from meetings and our meeting with Badr gave me energy towards socialization! Hicks has a specific request as well as Prodyck, to reconnect with the friendly values ​​of the beginnings of OS with close-knit communities, it is also our idea with Badr to contribute to this and we decided to hold an event in my region to bring together French speakers, but also other people were welcome. The event has passed, but we plan to renew the meetings, we tested the region for stability and we were 18 without problems, so we are encouraged to redo an event around friendship among French speakers and their friends

Hella Yver and Badr Norseman

As you can imagine, everyone who doesn't speak French will be asked to use a Translator, so they can join in the conversation. If you've got the Talista translator, which works very well in opensim, here's one tip for you - if you type a sentence, end it with a period, and then type something else, the translator will only translate the first sentence. It doesn't like periods or... ellipses! Something to bear in mind if you tend to type in paragraphs rather than short phrases. But back to the frenchies... What is Hella's general view of the Francophones of Opensim?

Hella Yver: It is a community different from our culture and which has a good number of gifted personalities and very involved in the life of OS, and the goal is to create events so that they themselves develop links. This will be announced in Osw, for the next meeting, which could have a fun theme. We need to speak about this with all French people interested are welcome, Hicks [Adder] has created a group "France Buildouille" and we have a discord, so we are already in discussions for the future. And Badr is testing the community and the translator (as he is not french speaker) , he is so courageous !

Badr is fluent in Translator among other languages!

Hella has another project she's working on. It's a photographic community concept, where she takes photographs of Opensim people of all grids, and posts them on Flickr as  a sort of collage of personalities, expressing in portrait form the creativity and diversity of residents. The photo below of Hicks Adder is an example of her work. If you'd like to get involved, why not send her an IM on Osgrid, or contact her via her Opensimworld profile  or on her Flickr page?

Hicks Adder  (Photo by Hella Yver)

Badr Norseman : It seems to me it is to promote the cohesion between French people and their friends in OS. And how all will develop in the future you will see. Trips to regions made by French people are maybe an option

 Hella Yver: Being French I am really happy to be able to connect with people from the country, this will be celebrated as often as we want, without any obligation but rather at the right time for everyone. Badr and I are on another project including all communities and roleplayers, in a desire also to bring together a serious group of people around the roleplaying game on the historical theme of the Vikings with combat training. The two projects come together, we are together to make them emerge by common agreement, including all serious people, of all languages ​​and cultures.

HG Address: hg.osgrid.org:80:Nadejdae
hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/Nadejdae/1148/873/21