Hi Kelly, I wonder if a better, more collegial approach, might be to redirect koha.org to the community site: koha-community.org. This might be better than going head to head with the Koha global community by resurrecting the old site in competition. Cheers Jo. Chris Cormack wrote:

* Kelly Sherman (ksherman@ptfs.com) wrote:

...

Hi,

*

I*m Kelly Sherman and I will be maintaining the News section of the koha.org website.* I believe that the News section should be a way to promote Koha advances and successes to the world.* In that capacity, I*m going to be relying on each of your organizations to send me information that I can post here.* The current News section has grown quite stale, with few new listings since the beginning of this year.* I have posted a few PTFS press releases here, but I*d really like to be able to promote news and information about all of the individuals and companies providing Koha development and support services for a fee.* Please send me any current information relating to your work with Koha so I can get that information up on the site.* In the future, please contact me as often as necessary with new information you*d like added.*

*

I look forward to hearing from you.

Hi Kelly

Due to the closed nature of http://koha.org, on February 2 the global community voted to move on from http://koha.org to http://koha-community.org.

http://stats.workbuffer.org/irclog/koha/2010-02-02#i_38166 http://koha-community.org/home/

"Due to long standing concerns in regards to the management of the koha.org domain, the Koha community decided to establish this website on 2 February 2010 to allow community members to provide information about Koha to users and developers in a timely and collaborative fashion.

The koha-community.org domain is held by the Horowhenua Library Trust, the progenitors of Koha.

The koha-community.org website is committed to collaboration between all members of the Koha Community."

All current Koha content is now located at that site, including PTFS news, and in the spirit of FOSS, everyone is welcome to participate there.

Chris Cormack

Koha Release Manager 3.4

...

*

Kind regards,

*

Kelly Sherman

PTFS, Inc.

(301) 654 * 8088 Ext 176

Hi Kelly, On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 5:23 PM, Chris Cormack <chrisc@catalyst.net.nz> wrote:

* Kelly Sherman (ksherman@ptfs.com) wrote:

...

I have posted a    few PTFS press releases here, but I*d really like to be able to promote    news and information about all of the individuals and companies providing    Koha development and support services for a fee.

I think there is a general agreement, if not indeed a consensus, that it is useful and beneficial for news about Koha to be widely available to Koha users as well as anybody remotely interested in Koha. There is also a place for news originating from commercial vendors who support Koha, although that can and should be only a part of the Koha story that we are all writing together. There is an unfortunate ambiguity in the sentence I just quoted - "for a fee" could modify "companies providing Koha and development and support services". This suffers from two problems. First, fee-based support vendors are not the only source of Koha news; libraries, Koha users, and independent developers do rather a lot of Koha stuff as well. Second, it is also superfluous - any vendor capable of supporting Koha is capable of publishing an RSS feed of their press releases or Koha articles that could be consumed by a feed aggregator. I chide Chris for a breach of netiquette by posting what appears to have been a private (although as far as I can tell, widely distributed) message to a public mailing list. However, I do not fault his impulse it to raise what is an issue of general concern to the Koha community in a public forum. Koha is a global project that uses very well established means of communication, and I recommend that you keep that in mind. In short, you should have introduced yourself on the Koha mailing list first, then solicited the news items. Better yet would have been initiating an open and frank discussion of PTFS' intentions concerning its plans for managing koha.org. Alternatively, "for a fee" could modify "to promote news and information", i.e., that you propose to charge other vendors to post news about Koha. Such a practice would be completely contrary to any prior management of koha.org, and I trust that this reading can be dismissed as simply a response to poor wording. As Chris Cormack has pointed out, a mechanism for posting Koha news in a fashion that doesn't require gatekeeping effort has been created on http://koha-community.org/. Anybody working for a Koha library, contributing to Koha, or using Koha can simply get an account on that website and post their news. Any commercial vendor who wishes to post relevant press releases can submit their RSS feed to the "support company news" feed aggregator. Regards, Galen -- Galen Charlton Koha 3.2 Release Manager VP for Data Services, Equinox Software Incorporated gmcharlt@gmail.com gmc@esilibrary.com