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.

French Weave

To weave the mirror's magic sights...

Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott

The appointed hour - the heure fixée -  is 12 noon SLT, let's call it 21 heure de Paris. The place, a marble palace on the tiny grid of Eden Cat, full of souvenirs, games, pictures, comfortable chairs, and music. The day - the first Thursday of the month.

It's time again for a regular get-together of anyone who enjoys the francophone community in Opensim. This month, half a dozen grids were represented among the participants, some with famous names, others bijou grids with only a handful of residents, some personal sanctuaries with a single  inhabitant.  It can be fun to have your own place, there's a lot to be said for it creatively and in terms of keep the drama to a minimum, but humans do tend towards gregariousness. Advice, encouragement, and some chill chit chat can make a welcome change.