[Koha] From the Kaitiaki

[Pat Eyler]

                                                      Aug 17, 2002

To the Koha community;

Hello all,
No note last week, and a late note this week.  My life has been a bit
turbulent of late, and I'm afraid that this note is one of the
things which has slipped.  Given the slower pace of activity during
the summer months and my own reduced amount of time to work on things
Koha, I'm going to be writing this note on a bi-weekly basis going
forward.

  1.2
 Steve has been pressing forward on the 1.2 tree and has just release
 RC10 of 1.2.3.  This series represents quite a few pieces of new
 functionality and bear some good testing.  If any of you have the time
 and resources to load it up and give it a try, your work would be
 appreciated.

  Community
 There's a nice new article about Koha in the offing.  I've just seen
 a draft of it, and hope to see it in publication soon.  If anyone
 else has the time and interest in writing about your experiences with
 Koha, I'd be happy to provide what help I'm able.  I think that
 www.linuxgazette.com (or the Linux Journal, its 'big brother') would
 look kindly upon a well written submission.

 There are some interesting developments in the Library Free Software
 community.  The most interesting to me has been the recent
 conversations in the MyLibrary project about how to proceed, how to
 set goals, and how to improve the quality of programming within the
 project.

 There are several ideas floating about, but I was intrigued at the
 idea of adding survey or logging to their software.  This is obviously
 something that would need to be done very openly and very carefully to
 avoid any privacy or trust issues.

 My questions to you are:
  1)  What feedback should the Koha developers be getting to help steer
  future development of Koha?
  2)  How can we get that feedback frequently, but without causing undo
  work for our users or violating their privacy (or that of their
  patrons)?

  Translation
 As seen from recent postings to the Koha mailing list, our Hindi and
 Bengali translations have started.  In addition, we now have two
 individuals in Germany who are working on translating Koha into German
 as well.  Things are proceeding apace.


As always, I'm excited to be a part of Koha's growing wave of success
and popularity.  I hope that everyone else is too.  See you in two weeks.


Thanks
Pat Eyler
Kaitiaki of the Koha Project