José Miguel Parrella Romero <joseparrella@gmail.com> wrote:

Koha-inspired ILS which is Catalyst-based (that's a future plan) [...] * Other library-related developments, such as Keystone/Greenstone. They will be considered "evaluation technologies".

These worry me: do I understand that you plan to use Koha's name to promote non-Koha library software? I'm unhappy with that. Please try not to confuse prospective users any more than necessary. Maybe you want to be running something like fosslib.org.ve as well as koha.org.ve? Apart from those, it all sounds like excellent ideas for helping a Spanish-speaking Koha community. Regards, -- MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Webmaster/web developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop maker, developer of koha, debian, gobo, gnustep, various mail and web s/w. Workers co-op @ Weston-super-Mare, Somerset http://www.ttllp.co.uk/

A few weeks ago a librarian and I bought and set up the koha.org.ve domain (which is now down for maintenance) where we would like to host several library-related open source developments. I'd hesitate to 'sign off' on using the Koha brand to host additional

* Koha, and a Koha test installation in spanish, with a particular template. Source code fully downloadable. We'd love to have someone join the development team to maintain the Spanish templates. So long as the POT files are kept up, the translation can be generated at install time. If you have ideas on how to improve

Hi José, First off, welcome to the Koha community, it's great to have you on board :-). See comments below: ----- "José Miguel Parrella Romero" <joseparrella@gmail.com> wrote: library-related OSS projects. It could add to the confusion over what Koha itself is. That said, I think we can acomplish some of your goals in a slightly different way: the Spanish of the installer itself, we'd love to hear them. You may also want to see our 'Beta' Translation framework: http://translate.koha.org It's based on Kartouche, and we've got a few ideas for how to make it even better, but in the meantime, we could add a Ve language and you could use that to make your changes (if it's convenient).

* Local templates (with effects as in jQuery) and spanish translations (we've used the ones already distributed with Koha, but they need to be further adapted for the Venezuelan reality, for example we don't call users "Socios", which means "Member" (as in a "Club Member") but instead we call them "Usuarios" (users) -- fully downloadable as FOSS. This is good to know, so we'll want to have both Spanish and Spanish_ve templates.

* Maybe a Koha-based ILS which uses AJAX (we're working on it) or a Koha-inspired ILS which is Catalyst-based (that's a future plan) They will be fully downloadable as soon as we have nice code to share. As far as the Koha-based ILS with AJAX, why not join the koha.org development directly? An Ajaxy interface for Koha would be an excellent contribution, and I'd hate to see it get lost in what is essentially a fork of the project. We're very liberal with our CVS privileges, and there's been a lot of talk lately about moving to a distributed version control system like 'git' which would make the process of sharing code between teams much easier.

* Other library-related developments, such as Keystone/Greenstone. They will be considered "evaluation technologies". In this case, I fear that you'd do both Koha and Keystone/Greenstone a disservice ... neither of them are a part of Koha, even if they do interoperate well with Koha ...

* Hopefully, documentation, in forms of reports, formal documentation (maybe DocBook-based) and presentations. Everything downloadable as free software. Again, this is a great idea, we'd love to have you get directly involved in the documentation at the project level; we've used DocBook for our http://kohadocs.org site, and it does seem like the best format moving forward for the 'official' documentation. If you have ideas on how to coordinate the writing and translation of documentation, we'd love to hear them.

* Contact information for both my partner and I as well as any other person in Venezuela which works with Koha and would like to be cited in the webpage as a "support option". We'd be glad to list you on http://koha.org/support/pay.html ... just send me your contact info and I'll add you.

* It will be cited as a Koha Interest Group for Venezuela.

* It will host a mailing list for spanish-speaking Koha users. Bugs or suggestions will be shared with the english-speaking mailing lists, as well as the bug tracker. Having a Spanish-speaking Koha users mailing list sounds like a great idea. I'd be happy to set one up for you on Savannah, or, if you would rather host it yourself, that's of course, your prerogative :-).

The site will be a little like koha-fr.org, but it will also host some non-Koha related stuff (though this may very well be off-webpage, for example in mailing lists or subdomains or a SVN server) -- I would also like to clarify that our plan is to stay _fully_ cooperative with current Koha developments and the current Koha namespace. I've already contacted with Tina Burger from LibLime in order to give some ideas and material for the webpage. Thanks for this assurance, we're glad that you're interested in becoming more active in the community.

Finally, I would like to know if using koha.org.ve seems sane for this. I'd be really worried if we either infringe a trademark (however, Koha

is not registered as a trademark in Venezuela, and most likely it won't -- the Patents and Trademarks Office has a very strong policy about FOSS-related trademarks, even when it breaks international treaties...

yes, we're an outlaw country :D) but I'd be most worried if this raises any undesirable reaction in our community. Please let me know your opinions if you're interested in doing so.

It's worth mentioning that koha.org recently changed hands from Katipo to LibLime. LibLime plans to re-implement the website under Plone (http://plone.org), which is what we use for our main website, http://liblime.com. This transition will enable us to have direct translations on the main koha.org website, so sites like koha-fr.org and koha.org.ve won't be necessary anymore. If you'd like to maintain a mirror of the new koha.org when it goes live, let me know and I'd be glad to get that coordinated. Thanks again for your email, You make a great addition into our community and we're thrilled to have you. If you have a chance, please hop on IRC sometime, we currently hang out on irc.katipo.co.nz #koha (my nick is kados). Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf@liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS