Create a Dolibarr local community

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the Dolibarr foundation

This page is a guide line to help local user groups to build their own community around Dolibarr project.

Things required to start

All following things are required to start to manage a local Dolibarr users' group or community. Please do all of this, in same order than provided here. If you want to work into an international project, you must also accept rules, and this order is one of this stupid rule (but not so stupid for us):

Prerequisites

0) Check a community for the couple (country/language) you plan to create does not already exists. If it does, try to join the existing community instead.

1) You must be a local foundation, or group of friends knowing open source software, or a local company, speaking english to be able to exchange with international foundation.

2) Ask an account onto this wiki (ask to contact@dolibarr.org providing your login, lastname, firstname and email). Then login to create a page specific with page name that is your personal name (firstname lastname, not your company or foundation name).

For this, once login on this wiki, go on page Firstname Lastname and change URL with your own firstname and lastname, and click on button "Create" after submitting new URL. Then, you can make a copy and paste of content of page Firstname Lastname and replace content with your own personal information. Fill paragraph "Other information / Autres informations / Otra información" to tell what you did or plan to do for Dolibarr. The goal of this is to have a card inside this wiki whose goal is to provide information on all Dolibarr actors. It's also the first time you provide structured and public information to main Dolibarr team (the Dolibarr foundation board team) to let us know you exists.

Also, submit a photo of yourself as a png file from a file that must be named "Firstname Lastname.png" (submit link is link "Upload file" on left menu of this wiki).

(Note: if you receive an antispam message about your web url, add a space between your hostname and first level domain name).

3) If you are a company: Add your name into the category "Other partners" for your country (or into category Preferred Partners if you are already a Preferred Partner), on the page: List of Dolibarr partners and providers (send a mail to contact@dolibarr.org if page for your country does not exists).

4) Check translation for the language of your country is completed and accurate. If not, this is the next step to work on. See page Translator documentation to know how to fix/submit Dolibarr translation).

5) Next step is to check the default setup provided by last version of Dolibarr is complete for your country (list of vat rates, list of states, list of companies type, ...). If not, send us SQL requests to have setup complete into Dolibarr sources installer (See all files into htdocs\install\mysql\data, complete them for your country and send modified files to contact@dolibarr.org).

6) Take a look at the wikipedia project for your language. If no page exists for Dolibarr project, try to add it. Just cut, paste and translate content of english page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolibarr) into a new page of the wikipedia for your language. If a page already exists, try to complete content to match english page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolibarr) and fix typo/translation errors.

Get a community portal ?

The www.dolibarr.org is now able to manage all languages in same web site. If your language is not supported, ask contact@dolibarr.org to add it.

It is no more recommended to create your own portal. This creates useless duplicates. Forum may not exists for your language. In such a case, your can create one, and ask us to add the link on the page https://www.dolibarr.org/forum.php

Animate your community

Once all previous steps are done, you are then free to animate your community like you want.

Do all actions you want to do in the way you want. This is some ideas :

• Man stands into congress (For example: french community presents Dolibarr into Salon_Solution_Linux_2010, Salon_Solution_Linux_2011, Salon_Solution_Linux_2012).

=> This is the most efficient way to promote Dolibarr !! Because then, you will get Open Source technical guys that will promote it for you.

• Organize BarCamp or Devcamp (See index page https://wiki.dolibarr.org/index.php/Category:DevCamps for example of already past devcamps).
• Publish news onto your portal home page.
• Create social networks groups, promote them and publish news/articles on them.

For social networks animation, we recommend to use Hootsuite to publish to all social networks at once. If you preferred to link to international social networks, you can still send your news by email to contact@dolibarr.org.

To help you for such tasks, you can use all materials provided by the Dolibarr foundation and available at GitHub repository (Git links available on page https://github.com/DolibarrFoundation/foundation)

You will find rollups, flyers, logos, business cards, etc, you can translate/reuse.

Things recommanded

You are free to animate your community like you want. But following this list of advices is recommanded to have your community growing.

• Translate all resources you can find into the foundation GIT repository (Git links available on page https://github.com/DolibarrFoundation/foundation), like SVG files used to create logos, rollups or business cards for your language. You can then use them into congress, forums, trade show or put them into show rooms or your web site.

This is the two most important point to have a big community :

• Post a lot of news onto local web sites, magazines for your country: the more you promote Dolibarr, the more you will get new users, new partners (or new customers if you are a company). When such news appears on a major media, tell us (contact@dolibarr.org).

• Man a stand into Opensource congress or forums: This is a very good way to have fun and to make Dolibarr growing into your country. If you do so (it's one of the most interesting and efficient thing to do), please create a page into this wiki with photo (example: Salon_Solution_Linux_2010). Report page into this wiki should be in English but if you host your own report page, with photos, into your language, send us a link (we will add a link at appropriate place into Dolibarr web sites).

Note:

When all things into chapter "Things required" are completed, if you are a company you may also apply to be a Preferred Partner. See Dolibarr Preferred Partner. It will also be a good thing if you are yourself a member of internationnal Dolibarr foundation. See page Subscribe.

Things allowed

This chapter describes explicit things you can do when you are a community manager of a local community:

• Use Dolibarr logo on your web site but use another logo as the trademark of your community.
• Use any materials provided by Dolibarr foundation and available into GitHub repository (Git links available on page https://github.com/DolibarrFoundation/foundation). You will find rollups, flyers, guides, logos, templates, etc. You can translate or use them for your need.
• Use any other tools of your choice to animate your community (video, wiki, etc...)
• Add links to any other Dolibarr web site (local or international) like the download central page: https://www.dolibarr.org/download/ , forum or any other pages
• Post news (english language only) onto official Dolibarr mailing-lists (user, dev) to annouce availability of your community.
• Represent Dolibarr into congress, show rooms with no need to ask anything to the Dolibarr foundation.
• Create and sells goodies. Revenues are yours.
• Use your community tools to promote some commercial services (such services must however all be related to Dolibarr), except SaaS/Cloud hosting services (there is always official SaaS/Cloud international hosting services so no need to add more/yours).
• Drink beers with all Dolibarr friends (but not too much).

Things forbidden

This chapter describes explicit things you can't do when you are a community manager of a local community:

• A community portal content must be into main language of your community and only main language (you can build a multi-language portal if your country has several dialect, what is important is not provide a couple (language/country) already covered by another portal). If you want to offer visibility to another couple (country/language), you must instead refer to links to existing portal that manage this couple.
• You can't use ads on a Dolibarr local site.
• You can't publish news (on online or press newspaper) into English that point to your local web site: If you publish a news into English, you can, but link must point to www.dolibarr.org. To publish news that link to your web site, you must publish a content that is in same language than your web site.
• You can't use local community portal to promote exclusively your own private services. This is what this means: If you are a company with your own services, then description and prices of such services must be on a different portal, with a different name. Don't forget that a community portal is brand of community project, not a direct home page of your business (even if it helps, it should just help), and community project and company portal are two different things. So, you can have links from your commercial web site to reach the community portal, but links from community portal must never link exclusively toward your commercial web site/services. If you really need to include such links, you must choose between:
  • A link to a "neutral page" opened to competitors or that show that you are not the only provider of solution, but just one of the most "engaged" company. For example, for a SaaS/Cloud hosting service, you can link to official wiki page Cloud_Solutions and ask to include your company or product page into this page. Or you can change are that present things like this "This is example of cloud services provided by company xxx" (meaning other companies may also provide such services). Another example, for a specialized module: You can add description of your module onto official wiki documentation of external modules https://wiki.dolibarr.org/index.php/Category:Complementary_modules and add a link to this page, or you can have your own page for you plugin but adding a link to say "This module is developped by xxx, for other modules developed by other companies, take a look at [link to wiki page].
  • Or, if you really need to put specific content into the community portal (with no external links, for example because you promote something really specific for your local business, not interesting for rest of the world), you can have a dedicated area into the portal to present a short description of service/product without prices, with a link to the site of your company (so a different web site not affiliated with the Dolibarr foundation) with more complete information, like long description and prices. If there is competitors for the service/product in same language than portal, then, into the dedicated area of community portal, you must offer competitors a way to request to add also their own link to their product page (but you can define that there is a sort criteria by age, so yours will be at top if you are the one that creates the community/portal). Never show any price on the community web site.