[Koha] Koha News Update

[Galen Charlton]

Hi Kelly,

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 5:23 PM, Chris Cormack <chrisc at catalyst.net.nz> wrote:
> * Kelly Sherman (ksherman at 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 at gmail.com
gmc at esilibrary.com