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<font face="Tahoma">Hello Koha Community!<br>
<br>
I wanted to take a few minutes to introduce myself. My name is Sean
McIntyre and I was brought on board PTFS, after they acquired LibLime
on March 15th, to manage all of the software development work related
to their ILS / Koha business. This is an exciting opportunity for me
and I wanted to share a bit of my background with all of you, as I
expect to be an active participant in this Open Source Community as it
moves forward (if you'll have me). <br>
<br>
My family and I live in Northern Virginia, outside of Washington D.C.
and have been here since 1981; which is a very long time for this area
of the United States. After graduating high school I went on to earn a
B.S. in Computer Science & Engineering at MIT in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Over the next 20+ years, I held a variety of positions
in the D.C. Metropolitan area in government contracting as well as
commercial software ventures. My resume includes two start-ups and the
last 6 years of my career at AOL; the last 3 of which I ran all the
technology on the AOL News site, the 4th largest in the world. My
background includes a dozen or more programming languages and
consistent use of open source software since the mid-90s.<br>
<br>
In my role here at LibLime, I am involved in all of our software
activities, particularly our large sponsored development projects. It
is my intent that my team and I will work effectively with the
community, building upon some of the collaboration that pre-dated the
acquisition in March. Most of our clients are strong advocates of
their sponsored development benefiting the open source community as a
whole and we intend to honor our clients desires in this area, even
encouraging those who feel less strongly about this. Our client base
has grown substantially since the acquisition and we have inherited two
very large, demanding software development activities that are on a
tight schedule. I mention this, as it has an impact on my resources in
the near term. Obviously, we have to place a priority on meeting the
needs of our paying clients and their time lines. At no time however
would I want that to cast a doubt on our overall goal to work
effectively with the community and make contributions. It just may be
the case that given our current resourcing and economics that features
built for our clients will be available to them first to test and flesh
out. This will allow our contributions to be of a higher quality then
if we released them immediately and to meet the demanding schedules we
have inherited. We are looking at different mechanisms to share with
the broad community what we are working on, with the thought of
reducing the duplication of effort on significant software enhancements
and I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we might do this most
effectively.<br>
<br>
Soon I'll be joining the IRC chat on a regular basis and welcome any
and all comments or thoughts. If you perceive my team or I are doing
something that is not as beneficial to the community as it could be,
please let me know. I'd be happy to talk about it and am optimistic
that many of these perceptions are based on mis-understandings that are
easily cleared up.<br>
<br>
Sincerely,<br>
Sean McIntyre<br>
Engineering Mgr, ILS<br>
LibLime, a Division of PTFS</font><br>
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