[Koha] Acceptance Letter

[Pat Eyler]

                                                   31 May, 2002
To the Koha community;
I'd like to take a moment to accept the role of Kaitiaki[1] of Koha,
to thank those who have done so much work already, and to give an
overview of where I think we need to be going as a community.

Let me start with a bit of background: for the last month or so, there
has been an ongoing discussion between the developers about the
desirability of an official management/leadership function for the
Koha project.  The good folks at Katipo have been doing an admirable
job in this area, and are voluntarily opening this process up to the
larger community.

The result of these discussions was a decision to elect a person to
oversee the project.  This person's role is to work with the other
developers and the users of Koha to guide its development into a
library system that can serve the needs of any library; large or
small, english speaking or not.  The Kaitiaki will help craft a
strategy for growth and development, encourage organizations to use
Koha, improve support for Koha, and recruit additional
developers for the project.

In our last meeting, 30 May 2002, the developers present decided to
name me, Pat Eyler, as the Kaitiaki.  I'm honored and humbled by this
decision.  I'd like to pledge to all of you, users and developers,
that I'll do my best to make Koha as successful, as complete, as
user-friendly, and as capable as it can possibly be.

Koha would not exist if not for the efforts of the Horowhenua Library
Trust (HLT) and Katipo.  I'll mention only three people by name, not
because they are the only ones to have worked on it, but because I'm
afraid I'd leave people out if I tried to mention everyone.  Rosalie
Blake (Head of Libraries for HLT), Rachel Hamilton-Williams (General
Manager at Katipo), and Chris Cormack (Programmer at Katipo) should be
well recognized for their courage and efforts.  I hope that we'll be
working together for a long time to come.

Since Koha's initial release to the world outside Katipo and HLT, many
others have contributed to the project.  I'd like to thank all of them
for their efforts, and encourage them to keep up their good work.

I'll close with a quick overview of my hopes for Koha in the coming
year or so.  In the near term, we'll be releasing Koha 1.2.0 featuring
a number of bug fixes and improvements.  We'll likely release a few
more 1.2 series releases as well featuring yet more improvements and
bug fixes. Sometime in the late summer or early fall, we'll begin
releasing the 1.4 series.  This release series will feature MARC
capabilities as well as continuing improvements.

In parallel to these efforts, we'll be trying to internationalize
Koha.  Our first targets will be Polish (updating an earlier
translation) and Spanish (a brand new translation).  The experience we
gain from these two efforts should help us make additional
translations much easier.

We're also going to work hard to raise community awareness of Koha in
both the Open Source/Free Software and the professional library
communities.  This work will involve announcements, appearances at
conferences, and more work on documentation.

If you'd like to participate in any of these efforts, or if you would
like to suggest additional projects for us to take on, please feel
free to email me at <pate at gnu.org>.

thanks,
-pate


Pat Eyler
Kaitiaki of the Koha Project

[1] Kaitiaki, pronounced kah-ee-tee-ah-kee (unless my Maori
pronunciation is badly off), means guardian.