[Koha] LITA national forum

[Brenda Chawner]

Bonjour Paul, and hello everyone else

I'll be going to this, and would be happy to report back on sessions that would be of interest to Koha participants. If anyone else on the list is going, perhaps we can arrange to meet at the conference and have a chat about Koha and open source software in general.

Paul asked "who is Brenda?". I am a lecturer in library and information management here in New Zealand, and teach courses in information technology and business information sources. I have been following Koha developments for a while now, and hope to be more involved with the project in the future.

Here is the abstract for my presentation at the LITA National Forum 2003:

Abstract/Outline:  What is involved in managing and participating in a distributed open source software development project? What options are available for organisations that choose to implement open source software? Koha, the world's first open source library management software package, was originally developed for the Horowhenua Library Trust, based in Levin, New Zealand, by Katipo Communications Limited, in Wellington, New Zealand. It was released as open source software under the GPL in 2000, and there are now 27 registered developers (and 84 subscribers to the development discussion list) working on new releases, in New Zealand, Canada, the United States and France, Poland, Germany, Spain, and New Caledonia. The Koha kaitiaki (project manager) is  in the state of Washington, USA. Koha is currently being used by libraries in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, and the United States, and people from India, and South America have also expressed interest in it . This session will cover the various Koha participant roles (such as project manager, developer, documenter, user), as well as the range of tools and techniques used by Koha participants to communicate with each other, using a case study approach.  These include email discussion lists, IRC, and a wikiwikiweb (or wiki for short), as well as a bug tracking utility.

I wrote the abstract quite a while ago, and know that the number of developers and list of countries using Koha are out-of-date - I hope to have these updated for the presentation. I expect that the handouts from the talk will be available on the LITA website following the conference - I'll send the URL to the list when (and if) it's available. 

You might also be interested in the bibliography of articles and other material about open source software for libraries I have made available at

http://www.vuw.ac.nz/staff/brenda_chawner/biblio.html

I hope to have an updated version of the bibliography done by the end of September.

--
Brenda Chawner
School of Information Management
Victoria University of Wellington
P O Box 600
Wellington  NEW ZEALAND
(04) 463 5780        fax (04) 463 5446        brenda.chawner at vuw.ac.nz