31 May, 2002 To the Koha community; I'd like to take a moment to accept the role of Kaitiaki[1] of Koha, to thank those who have done so much work already, and to give an overview of where I think we need to be going as a community. Let me start with a bit of background: for the last month or so, there has been an ongoing discussion between the developers about the desirability of an official management/leadership function for the Koha project. The good folks at Katipo have been doing an admirable job in this area, and are voluntarily opening this process up to the larger community. The result of these discussions was a decision to elect a person to oversee the project. This person's role is to work with the other developers and the users of Koha to guide its development into a library system that can serve the needs of any library; large or small, english speaking or not. The Kaitiaki will help craft a strategy for growth and development, encourage organizations to use Koha, improve support for Koha, and recruit additional developers for the project. In our last meeting, 30 May 2002, the developers present decided to name me, Pat Eyler, as the Kaitiaki. I'm honored and humbled by this decision. I'd like to pledge to all of you, users and developers, that I'll do my best to make Koha as successful, as complete, as user-friendly, and as capable as it can possibly be. Koha would not exist if not for the efforts of the Horowhenua Library Trust (HLT) and Katipo. I'll mention only three people by name, not because they are the only ones to have worked on it, but because I'm afraid I'd leave people out if I tried to mention everyone. Rosalie Blake (Head of Libraries for HLT), Rachel Hamilton-Williams (General Manager at Katipo), and Chris Cormack (Programmer at Katipo) should be well recognized for their courage and efforts. I hope that we'll be working together for a long time to come. Since Koha's initial release to the world outside Katipo and HLT, many others have contributed to the project. I'd like to thank all of them for their efforts, and encourage them to keep up their good work. I'll close with a quick overview of my hopes for Koha in the coming year or so. In the near term, we'll be releasing Koha 1.2.0 featuring a number of bug fixes and improvements. We'll likely release a few more 1.2 series releases as well featuring yet more improvements and bug fixes. Sometime in the late summer or early fall, we'll begin releasing the 1.4 series. This release series will feature MARC capabilities as well as continuing improvements. In parallel to these efforts, we'll be trying to internationalize Koha. Our first targets will be Polish (updating an earlier translation) and Spanish (a brand new translation). The experience we gain from these two efforts should help us make additional translations much easier. We're also going to work hard to raise community awareness of Koha in both the Open Source/Free Software and the professional library communities. This work will involve announcements, appearances at conferences, and more work on documentation. If you'd like to participate in any of these efforts, or if you would like to suggest additional projects for us to take on, please feel free to email me at <pate@gnu.org>. thanks, -pate Pat Eyler Kaitiaki of the Koha Project [1] Kaitiaki, pronounced kah-ee-tee-ah-kee (unless my Maori pronunciation is badly off), means guardian.