gvSIG in Russia: from Localization to Community
Since the middle of 2000th the gvSIG became one of the popular open source GIS in Russia. But the absence of the Russian localization for the UI and user documentation delayed a spreading of the gvSIG in Russia.
In 2008 the authors initiated the collaboration with the gvSIG team and then began to collaborate with the gvSIG Association as translators of the UI. Later the Russian GIS-Lab Community joined a translation process and by January 2011 the greater part of strings was translated into Russian. In 2009 GIS-Lab Community translated the user documentation of the gvSIG 1.1.
In the beginning of 2011 the main work of localization of the gvSIG Desktop and gvSIG Mobile into Russian was done. In the same time the gvSIG Association opened new opportunities for international users and developers based on user's communities. Together with the gvSIG Association the Russian gvSIG Community was created in January 2011.
The first steps of the coordinators of the Russian gvSIG Community have been associated with the creation of the information infrastructure of the Community in Russian language. First of all the blog of the Russian gvSIG Community and microblog in Twitter were created. Later the gvSIG group was created in Vkontakte which is the most popular Russian social network. In the summer of 2011 the gvSIG Download Portal was created to provide the easy access to gvSIG for Russian users.
In May 2012 the 1st Russian gvSIG Meeting was held in Lipetsk in the Lipetsk State Pedagogical University. In the end of May 2012 the gvSIG was presented in the Russian GIS Forum 2012 in Kazan. And in November 2012 the gvSIG will be presented at the first Russian Open GIS Conference in Moscow.
To promote the gvSIG in universities authors prepared the Open GIS practical book based on the gvSIG.
The authors are also trying to use the gvSIG in the contract works which we are carrying out for our clients. One of that projects devoted to the monitoring of the agricultural lands was published on the gvSIG Outreach web site as Case Study.
In the talk authors would like to speak about further plans to promote the gvSIG in Russia in 2013 and later.
In this way the coordinators of the Russian gvSIG Community trying to spread the gvSIG Project's software products in Russia and support Russian users effort in use of the open geospatial software on Russian GIS market.
