C.I.D - The clever bison & la rentrée

The clever bison & la rentrée

OK so this blog has been silent for a little over a month...and for the excellent reason that both Blandine and I have been making the most of the summer to ressource, revive and relax with our respective families.

France has many old traditions and one of them is the annual departures for vacation where half of the country (or a little less) leave for holidays at the end of the school term in early July and the next half leave as the July lot are on their way home at the beginning of August. It makes for fantastic traffic queues all over France's motorway network and constant updates from an organisation called 'Bison futé' (literally translated : the clever bison !) who will tell you which weekends to avoid and how many kilometres of tail backs there are all over the country...slightly depressing if you have chosen to travel on one of the weekends the bison has classed as 'black' with traffic ! If you are travelling in France, check out the website on :www.bison-fute.equipement.gouv.fr/diri/Accueil.do. This site is managed by the Ministry of the Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development and Town and Country Planning.

Most of the time, the best way to avoid the heavy traffic is to take minor roads and not motorways...and in fact, from experience, this is often a great way to see this beautiful land. A good way to prepare your trip si to use another French website (also has an English version called Mappy.com : www.mappy.com/ (which managed to detect the fact I was in Bangkok and opened up with a map of the city..).
This summer we must have covered 3000km journeying from the Auvergne to the Drome, then to the Creuse, an obscure and totally unspoiled region of central France, to the fabulous Dune du Pyla near Arcachon, Western Europe's biggest sand dune, to Pau and then north thorugh the Bordeaux wine region to Poitiers and then on to Paris.

And now, like the rest of France, we are preparing for the rentrée...schools are back next week, crayons and pens have been bought and named, and life will tick back into routine. There are a variety of websites to help you prepare the rentrée and one that struck me as being particularly ingenious is www.vivelarentree.com/index.html. The title didn't strike me as commercial and I rather expected to find some friendly advice on how to get through this return to work period that is such a French obsession (which other country get's so wound up about it ?..even the expression la rentrée can only mean one thing: the start of the new school year). Anyway, if you click on Vive La Rentrée (translated = 'longlive the start of the school year !') you will enter an Office Depot site dedicated to school stationary...and claiming that Office Depot is the Official Supplier for 'la rentrée'. Well done Office Depot : 10/10 and school hasn't even begun.

From hot and sunny Bangkok I wish you a totally 2.0 rentrée where your pencils are sharp, the ink flows, your fingers are flexed and, above all, you're able to find time to employ your social media tools to enhance your professional and personal well being...Are your RSS feeds up to date ? What is your blog readership doing ? Is your company intranet sexy or boring ?..and who many friends have you picked up over the summer on Facebook ?

PS :
If you are interested in a more indepth debate on Enterprise 2.0 rentrées (it's in French!) I suggest the following post on B-R-ENT our favourite Intranet Manager's blog : b-r-ent.com/news/rentree-des-classes-episode-3-creez-une-plate-forme-d-echange-de-formation-et-un-suivi
Mots-clés : la rentrée, B-R-ENT , bison futé, mappy, summer, France, autoroutes