Hi everyone, Briefly, I'm Joshua Ferraro (kados on IRC) and I'm the new release manager for 2.4. Thanks everyone for your support! We had quite a lot of activity at our Town Hall meeting yesterday which tells me folks are still interested in the project -- I'm also sure that there are folks out there still itching to get involved but who aren't sure how to get started. If one of those profiles fits you ... get ready ... there's lots to be done and we'll be depending on you to help ... ALL of you. So, first off, if you missed the meeting you can read the whole transcript here: http://koha.org/cgi-bin/logs.pl?recall=recall&saved_query=Town%20Hall%20Meeting%2020%20May%202005 My TODO list is here: http://wiki.liblime.com/doku.php?id=koha24rmnotes Please feel free to add to/comment on the TODO: it's a scratch pad for now. I'll be moving stuff to the official Koha wiki as things get more organized and definitive. Speaking of organization: before I commit to any deadlines or features to be included, I'd like to organize a few meetings for 'focus groups' to discuss each major 'component' of Koha 2.4. Based on the discussions I will select a 'manager' for each component who will be responsible for ensuring the success of that component. Here are the components: Website/Interface Design This group discusses the overall user experience of Koha: the official website, colors, logos, and interfaces of the OPAC and Intranet. As new features are introduced, the interface designers will ensure that the features meet the Koha standard for usability, beauty, accessability, and standards compliance. Documentation This group discusses documentation in Koha: user manuals, wikis, code documentation, etc. If you're not a programmer yet, consider writing docs for something not currently documented. Internationalization This group will be responsible for ensuring that Koha can accomodate multiple languages -- they discuss things like utf8 (did everyone see the latest version of Marc::Record now supports utf8), translation of templates, website, etc. New Features This group discusses new features to be added in Koha 2.4: what we can realistically acomplish, who can finance it, and who can program it. NCIP, Consortium Support, PLucene, etc. Quality Assurance and Bug Squashing This group will be responsible for making sure that the 2.2 code is bug free and that any new features are bug free. If you don't have coding experience you can start by noticing bugs and pointing them out here. And if you are learning to program, you can hone your skills by spotting other folks mistakes ;-). So ... five groups to start with. The New Features group is the 'catch all' group for now. There's obviously some overlap here so if you've got a better idea for how to organize our groups I'm all ears. Following this email I'll start threads for each group so we can begin discussions. I'll be chairing all the initial meetings (unless Rach would like to share the load) until I appoint a manager for the group. I'd like to make sure that everyone who wants to participate in a group can attend -- I realize this is tricky with us spread around the globe as we are. I've considered signing up at meetup.com where we could vote on the time of the next meeting but before I do that, does anyone know of a free service that would meet the same purpose? In addition to our 'focus group' IRC meetings, we'll have a monthly IRC Town Hall meeting (a brief one), weekly bug squashing meetings, and weekly updates from me on how things are proceeding. Stay tuned for details on when these will be happening. A word about our international friends. If you are not fluent in English, but you still want to contribute, please do! I can read French, German, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese (slowly), so you can email me if you would like to get involved. That's all for now. -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Koha ILS, Mambo Intranet, DiscrimiNet Filter jmf@liblime.com | Full Demos at http://liblime.com | 1(888)KohaILS _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
Hi there, If you're just getting started learning about Koha or have been on this list for a while but haven't really gotten involved too deeply in Koha, this e-mail is for you. Regardless of whether you have programming abilities, you can get involved in the Koha development process. Do you have ideas for neat features to be included? Would you like to learn to program Perl? Do you have some financial resources that you could contribute (even a few hundred dollars goes a long way)? Can you translate Koha into your native language? Here are some ways you can get involved. 1. Join the Developer's Mailing List: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/koha-devel 2. Want to Learn to Program with Perl? Here's the book many of us learned on: http://learn.perl.org/redirect?url=book;bookstore=amazon;bookisbn=0596001320 You can also check out http://learn.perl.org which has lots of free Perl resources. 3. How to Contribute Financially First off, understand that although Koha is free, many of us developers make a living _supporting_ Koha. The more money we can make with Koha, the less we need to find other jobs to make ends meet. So if you've got any monetary resources that you can devote to Koha, please consider it. Even a small sum can go a long way. How to get the ball rolling? You could write a private message to one of the developers, naming the project you would like to 'sponsor' and the amount of funds you can devote to it. You could develop an RFP (Request for Proposal) if your idea is large (NCIP for example), and then notify the koha-devel list. Check the support page for a list of folks who can support Koha: http://koha.org/installation/support.html 4. Translating Koha into Your Language If you're willing to devote time translating Koha into your language please do! We're going to need help translating the website as well as the Koha interfaces and documentation into as many languages as possible. Join the koha-devel list and introduce yourself as a translator. 5. Give Us Feedback If you're able, install Koha, play around with it, and give us feedback. If you can't install it yourself, you can try out the Koha demos. There are a couple of full demos available: LibLime's 2.2 Demos: OPAC: http://opac.liblime.com login with card numbers 1-10 and password 'liblime' Intranet: http://koha.liblime.com login with username 'circ' and password 'liblime' HLT/Katipo 2.0 Demos: OPAC: http://opac.library.org.nz Intranet: http://hlt.katipo.co.nz login with username 'hdl' and password 'testing' Go ahead and use these demos to the full, add borrowers, check out books to them, add items, do your worst! :-) and then let us know what you'd like improved. So ... the bottom line is, get involved! :-) -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Koha ILS, Mambo Intranet, DiscrimiNet Filter jmf@liblime.com | Full Demos at http://liblime.com | 1(888)KohaILS _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
Hi all, I have taken what Joshua wrote and combined it with the existing content on the How Can I Contribute to Koha? http://www.koha.org/contribute/ Cheers Russel Joshua Ferraro wrote:
Hi there,
If you're just getting started learning about Koha or have been on this list for a while but haven't really gotten involved too deeply in Koha, this e-mail is for you.
-- Russel Garlick Operations Manager Katipo Communications Ph 934 1285 Mob 027 537 1377 Web www.katipo.co.nz _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
Joshua Ferraro wrote:
2. Want to Learn to Program with Perl? Here's the book many of us learned on:
Personally, I'd ask you to not support the ePatenter amazon and start off with "perldoc perlintro" or "man perlintro" on the command line of a system with perl installed. It's free (as in beer) and fast, a way to start slamming yourself up the learning curve, with pointers on to the other bits of the perl manuals. koha uses modules and CGI (see "perldoc CGI") quite heavily, so they're good things to play with. If there's interest, I could do some perl training for new koha-devel people, maybe with some IRC. Mention it on koha-devel if you're interested. -- MJ Ray (slef), K.Lynn, England, email via http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ http://www.ttllp.co.uk/koha/ _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
participants (3)
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Joshua Ferraro -
MJ Ray -
Russel Garlick