I was at OpenWorldForum in Paris a few weeks ago, together with fellow Apache members Sander Striker and Emmanuel Lécharny.

My first impressions (apart from the fact that Paris is always nice - I knew that already) were that the French tend to wear suits and say "vous" (polite form of "you") instead of "tu" (the familiar form) which I would tend to use in geeky circles. Cultural differences...

But more seriously, how well does the french-speaking world know the Apache Software Foundation? Not well, it seems to me. In most of our discussions people could associate the ASF with the Apache HTTP Server project, but not much more. 2'000 committers? 300 members? Really?

To help improve this, I hope that the ASF can take a more active role in the conference next year, I'll bring this up next week at ApacheCon with our conference people.

In the meantime french-speaking folks are welcome to learn a bit more about it thanks to TiViPRO's interviews of Emmanuel and myself, shot during the conference.