[Koha] Summary of Open session at KohaCon13 - with a focus on Funding the Future of Koha.

[Paul Poulain]

Le 07/11/2013 17:31, glaws a écrit :
>> An important comment here from the attendees was that when someone is
>> funding a development - they should not just fund the code, but also plan
>> for time and funding for the Sign-Off process and the QA process.
> *+1. Excellent idea! How would this work? Would the
> funding organization contract directly with a separate dev
> to signoff/QA, or would the code developer contract
> with someone to do this? Would there be a conflict of
> interest if the funding organization had someone on their staff
> sign/QA if that person was qualified?*
I started a private discussion with some other developers yesterday,
about this question.

There are different ways to achieve this goal:
 * the funder funds 3 different organisations he choose
 * the funder funds 1 organisation, that sub-contract 2 others

I'm about to try something like that in France. Seen from France side,
if we want to have a chance to get some funding, it must be simple for
the funder. So funding 1 org, that is responsible of subcontracting 2
others.

>> Funding and how would we organize this?  Since many in the audience were
>> from the USA - there was discussion of getting a users group going again OR
>> creating some sort of “non-profit like org” where libraries could pool
>> funding towards projects.  An organization like this would be able to apply
>> for grants etc.  Something where we could crowd-source funding and then
>> fund a developer for a number of hours towards a project.
> *+1. I also am generally in favor of charging some nominal amount
> to attend KUG's/conferences. Even if it's just 25 USD--split the
> amount between the hosting organization for coffee and contribute
> some to Koha plumbing. US libraries typically can't just "donate"
> money to anything, but they certainly are used to paying attendance
> fees, and $25 or $50 is only a small fraction of the cost of flying
> and hotels.*
maybe that's possible for US meetings.
For french ones, we decided to keep them free, because we want to
attract more libraries to those conferences ! OTOH, the french NPO
("kohala") has decided to increase the NPO membership fee, to have a
little bit more money to fund some work. It's been considered as a valid
option, because the membership is made by libraries that already use
Koha, so they understand what the money can be used for.
Note that the amount risen is much too small to fund what we need.

> *And as long as I'm on the general subject of funding, I've often
> thought privately that there should be some way to help out the
> Horowhenua Library Trust for their work of holding the Koha keys.
> In an ideal world they should have a 10 million USD trust fund to
> aggressively support Koha.*
10 millions, I would be very happy for the project with this amount. I
would even be happy with just one ;-)

>> Have a hackfest in Athen’s Ohio next summer.  Next year will be 10 years
>> since Koha migrated to the US and I think it’s about time we have a
>> hackfest here. 
> *+1*
+1 too. We plan to have the 4th "hackfest in Europe" in 2014 march, I
hope I'll be able to send one or more BibLibre hackers to Athens OH !

>>  I have briefly talked with Owen Leonard about putting this
>> together for next summer...
>> Gauge the interest of a North American Koha users group so at least we are
>> having more of the community meeting together and sharing practices and
>> ideas.  Comments from Galen "As far as a US or North American user group
>> goes: I think a relaunch should start off with just the goal of hosting a
>> US/NA conference, as it would /not/ be necessary to set up a nonprofit
>> first to run conferences.  
> *+1*
Yes, my preference going to work on both !

> *Staccato comment #1: most of the Koha conferences to date
> (to the limited extent I'm qualified to comment on this) have been
> very technically focused.
Not sure I understand what you mean here. The first 3 days, are really
non tech focused.
The hackfest is. And there's been different hackfests, depending on the
audience: we sometimes do a lot of teaching how to hack Koha, and
sometimes do actual hacking.
This year, it was mostly focused on hacking, as most of attendees being
long timer Koha hackers. But there's been some training for newbies as
well (and I hope they've been happy with what they learned !)

> Someday there will begin to be more and
> more library staff attending, and those people will be more
> interested in end-user things. And someday I expect that KohaCon's
> will have different tracks, like code development, system
> administration and library staff interest. I think we need to start
> considering our audience soon.
In "hackfest in Europe", we had something like 12-15 librarians (most of
them with *NO* technical skills)
They've been *very* happy to:
 * work on non technical things like translations, or documentation
 * test patches using sandboxes
 * have talks together
The 1st year I organized the hackfest, I had only a few librarians
announcing themselves. So I send 10 mails to our 10 largest customers,
with some arguments to convince them to send someone. And those
arguments were specific to each. Something like "hey, you want this into
Koha, there's a patch, come and we will let you know how to test it"
It took me almost a full day to write those 10 mails.
BUT : the result was *great* ! 8 of them answered "hey, I didn't
understood that it could be so interesting. OK, I'll come".
The year after, they came again. And in 2013, again.
What was wrong was *bootstraping* the hackfest.

So YES, if you want to participate, you can, even if you don't know a
line of Perl !

> *Staccato comment #2: apologies first, I've long considered the following,
> but I have some trouble expressing it coherently. Say with a larger
> project like plumbing, let's presume 250,000 USD is raised by some
Could you say 500,000 please ? Or even 1M, that would be perfect ;-)

> means by an independent organization, and by some fair and
> equitable method one of the major Koha support companies or
> independent developers is selected to do the work.
Not only one, but 3 : one to develop, one to signoff, one to QA.

> As far as
> I know, all these qualified entities are already writing Koha code
> full-time, i.e., nobody has a lawn-care business for their
> daytime job and only write code when they get funded. So if we take
> our 250k and pay for a major rewrite, we're taking away from the
> development pool by substituting paid work for
> "otherwise-compensated" work already being done.
Yes and no. If you come and say "I've 1M for you, you start tomorrow
morning on plumbing, I'll have some trouble to do it. But if you let me
3 months I can organise my company: change planning of some projects,
hire a new developer,...
My agenda is full for the next 2 months. We've some project that will
probably start in january, but that's our business to manage priorities
and agendas !

> Assuming we can equate the two types of work (improbable?),
> there is no net gain. In economic terms, this *somewhat analogous* to an
> "opportunity cost"-the cost of an alternative that must be forgone in
> order to achieve a different objective.
Wrong asumption I think.
I would that I would prefer, from far, having 2 developers working on
plumbing, than putting plaster on wounds (google translate here,
frenchism suspected ;-) )
And most developers (at least BibLibre one's) are really willing to do
plumbing, beacuse they're tired of adding lines on code they would
prefer to rewrite to have it more modular, more modern, ...

-- 
Paul POULAIN - Associé-gérant
Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08
http://www.biblibre.com
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