Sep 27, 2002 To the Koha community Welcome, This bi-week's edition of my newsletter is a bit longer than normal. I think this is an accurate reflection of the increased pace of work being done on Koha. We've got new developers working on Koha, new libraries investigating Koha, new projects within Koha, and more public awareness of Koha. I hope that I can do justice to all of the efforts that are going on. As usual, if I managed to miss something, or if I get something wrong, my apologies. Please don't hesitate to contact me at kaitiaki@koha.org if you have any questions, concerns, or large piles of money you'd like to give away ;) 1.2 Work is moving along on 1.2.3, with RC14 having been recently released. Steve has also made several improvements to the Koha Demo CD. It is now capable of running a client to demonstrate Koha on a single box. We're still looking for testers and feedback. If you haven't tried the CD yet, please give it a whirl and let us know what you think. It would be nice to be able to clean up any problems, and to develop some solid documentation for it, but we'll need everyones help. 1.4 1.3.0 has been released! This is a major step in the development of the 1.4 series. For the first time, general developers and testers can start making use of the expanded API available with Koha. At this point, there are no user visible changes but new 1.4 centric tools should start appearing in 1.3 releases soon. Please note, the 1.3 series is *not* intended for production use. It is alpha software and should be treated as such. On the other hand, if you have the hardware and time, we'd love to hear about your experiences testing 1.3.0 or any of the 1.3 series releases. Documentation Andrew Aranson is a new contributor and has been working on developer level documentation (called POD). Ewan Tempero is also working on developer level documentation, his efforts have been targeted at developing use cases describing the expected behavior of various programs. As Andrew and Ewan produce more and more information, it will make it significantly easier for new developers to get started with Koha. Nicholas Rosasco has also stepped up the pace on his documentation efforts. He's getting ready to make another release and has asked for final comments from anyone who's read it. (If you're listed in the credits, he's especially interested in hearing about any mistakes or typos.) Translations We've just had a volunteer from South Africa step up to work on Koha. With the recent move toward Open Source Software by the South African government (see http://www.oss.gov.za/ for more details), we hope to see users, translators, and developers coming on-board. The french Koha list is becoming much more active. There are now over thirty users on the list, and email is flying around at an astounding rate. If you're interested in translations, please get involved. The following groups are currently active: French translation fr.koka.org German translation de.koha.org To subscribe to a mailing list for one of these languages, please send email to koha-subscribe@<language site> (koha-subscribe@fr.koha.org for example). Bear in mind, discussion on these lists is in the native language of the list, please respect this. We're hoping to get es.koha.org and za.koha.org running soon. General translation discussions should occur (in english) on the koha-translate mailing list hosted at sourceforge. This list also receives documents to be translated (such as this one). If you want to translate a Koha announcement, please contact the author. If you want to translate one of these newsletters, please do. I ask only that you send me a copy of the translation so that I can post it to an appropriate website. Community Last week we got a mention in the Biblio-tech monthly review (see http://www.biblio-tech.com/ for the story). Rosalie Blake (of HLT) presented a talk on OSS and Koha to her local library association. We seem to be cropping up in the press more and more often. If you're at all interested in helping keep us in the public eye (and getting a bit of press for yourself), please contact me to discuss a press release covering your recent decision to adopt Koha or your implementation of Koha. Thanks to those who responded to me about Linux, OSS, or Library conferences. We're coordinating presentations now for at least four appearances. We'd welcome more though, so please feel free to contact me if you're interested. (Even making a presentation to a Linux or Perl users group would help.) There's also been another investment in Koha development. An anonymous patron has stepped forward to sponsor a core developer's work on extending Koha. With more organizations catching the vision of Koha as a cooperative effort, I think we'll be seeing more of this happen in the days to come. 120 day review Well, I've been serving as the Kaitiaki for about 120 days now, so I thought I might do a quick self evaluation and comparison against my stated goals. When I initially talked about taking on the role, I laid out goals in three areas; Code Cleanliness, Feature Inclusion, and Koha Uptake. I'll address each of these separately. Code Cleanliness: I had (and still have) a vision of a code base that's easy to read, easy to modify, and easy to verify. There have been a couple of improvements in this area, but most of them have occurred in spite of my inaction. I'm encouraged to see efforts at writing tests and programmer documentation, and plan on encouraging this effort as we move forward. Feature Inclusion: Koha has certainly seen a number of new additions; the installer, the upgrade script, templating, etc. I hope that the RFPs from Nelsonville will spur both more development and greater sponsorship from other libraries. With the recent start of the 1.3 release series, I think we'll be seeing a lot more changes soon. Koha Uptake: I think this has been the place where I've really come through on my vision. I had wanted to put Koha in front of a lot of eye balls. With stories in a variety of press outlets, press releases, and planned presence at several conferences in the next six months, I think that we've really begun to establish ourselves as a valid option in the eyes of libraries. Overall, I think I've been successful in my role thus far. I'm honored to have the opportunity to work with so many talented and wonderful people. I'd like to especially thank Chris Cormack (the 1.2 Release Manager), Paul Poulain (the 1.4 Release Manager), and Nicolas Rosasco (the Marketing & Recruiting Manager) -- without their efforts the last 120 days would not have gone nearly as well. I hope that you're as excited about our progress as I am. I really do think that we're looking at a really bright future. happy hacking, Pat Eyler Kaitiaki/manager the Koha project