[Koha] Introduction - Sean McIntyre

[Sean T. McIntyre]

Hello Koha Community!

I wanted to take a few minutes to introduce myself.  My name is Sean 
McIntyre and I was brought on board PTFS, after they acquired LibLime on 
March 15th, to manage all of the software development work related to 
their ILS / Koha business.  This is an exciting opportunity for me  and 
I wanted to share a bit of my background with all of you, as I expect to 
be an active participant in this Open Source Community as it moves 
forward (if you'll have me).

My family and I live in Northern Virginia, outside of Washington D.C. 
and have been here since 1981; which is a very long time for this area 
of the United States.  After graduating high school I went on to earn a 
B.S. in Computer Science & Engineering at MIT in Cambridge, 
Massachusetts.  Over the next 20+ years, I held a variety of positions 
in the D.C. Metropolitan area in government contracting as well as 
commercial software ventures.  My resume includes two start-ups and the 
last 6 years of my career at AOL; the last 3 of which I ran all the 
technology on the AOL News site, the 4th largest in the world.  My 
background includes a dozen or more programming languages and consistent 
use of open source software since the mid-90s.

In my role here at LibLime, I am involved in all of our software 
activities, particularly our large sponsored development projects.  It 
is my intent that my team and I will work effectively with the 
community, building upon some of the collaboration that pre-dated the 
acquisition in March.  Most of our clients are strong advocates of their 
sponsored development benefiting the open source community as a whole 
and we intend to honor our clients desires in this area, even 
encouraging those who feel less strongly about this.  Our client base 
has grown substantially since the acquisition and we have inherited two 
very large, demanding software development activities that are on a 
tight schedule.  I mention this, as it has an impact on my resources in 
the near term.  Obviously, we have to place a priority on meeting the 
needs of our paying clients and their time lines.  At no time however 
would I want that to cast a doubt on our overall goal to work 
effectively with the community and make contributions.  It just may be 
the case that given our current resourcing and economics that features 
built for our clients will be available to them first to test and flesh 
out.  This will allow our contributions to be of a higher quality then 
if we released them immediately and to meet the demanding schedules we 
have inherited.  We are looking at different mechanisms to share with 
the broad community what we are working on, with the thought of reducing 
the duplication of effort on significant software enhancements and I'd 
love to hear your thoughts on how we might do this most effectively.

Soon I'll be joining the IRC chat on a regular basis and welcome any and 
all comments or thoughts.  If you perceive my team or I are doing 
something that is not as beneficial to the community as it could be, 
please let me know.  I'd be happy to talk about it and am optimistic 
that many of these perceptions are based on mis-understandings that are 
easily cleared up.

Sincerely,
Sean McIntyre
Engineering Mgr, ILS
LibLime, a Division of PTFS
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