[Koha] From the Kaitiaki

[Pat Eyler]

                                                       Sep 27, 2002

To the Koha community

Welcome,

This bi-week's edition of my newsletter is a bit longer than normal.
I think this is an accurate reflection of the increased pace of work
being done on Koha.  We've got new developers working on Koha, new
libraries investigating Koha, new projects within Koha, and more
public awareness of Koha.

I hope that I can do justice to all of the efforts that are going on.
As usual, if I managed to miss something, or if I get something wrong,
my apologies.  Please don't hesitate to contact me at
kaitiaki at koha.org if you have any questions, concerns, or large
piles of money you'd like to give away ;)

1.2
  Work is moving along on 1.2.3, with RC14 having been recently
  released.

  Steve has also made several improvements to the Koha Demo CD.  It is
  now capable of running a client to demonstrate Koha on a single
  box.  We're still looking for testers and feedback.  If you haven't
  tried the CD yet, please give it a whirl and let us know what you
  think.  It would be nice to be able to clean up any problems, and to
  develop some solid documentation for it, but we'll need everyones
  help.

1.4
  1.3.0 has been released!  This is a major step in the development of
  the 1.4 series.  For the first time, general developers and testers
  can start making use of the expanded API available with Koha.  At
  this point, there are no user visible changes but new 1.4 centric
  tools should start appearing in 1.3 releases soon.

  Please note, the 1.3 series is *not* intended for production use.
  It is alpha software and should be treated as such.  On the other
  hand, if you have the hardware and time, we'd love to hear about
  your experiences testing 1.3.0 or any of the 1.3 series releases.

Documentation
  Andrew Aranson is a new contributor and has been working on
  developer level documentation (called POD).  Ewan Tempero is also
  working on developer level documentation, his efforts have been
  targeted at developing use cases describing the expected behavior
  of various programs.  As Andrew and Ewan produce more and more
  information, it will make it significantly easier for new developers
  to get started with Koha.

  Nicholas Rosasco has also stepped up the pace on his documentation
  efforts.  He's getting ready to make another release and has asked
  for final comments from anyone who's read it.  (If you're listed in
  the credits, he's especially interested in hearing about any
  mistakes or typos.)

Translations
  We've just had a volunteer from South Africa step up to work on
  Koha.  With the recent move toward Open Source Software by the South
  African government (see http://www.oss.gov.za/ for more details), we
  hope to see users, translators, and developers coming on-board.

  The french Koha list is becoming much more active.  There are now
  over thirty users on the list, and email is flying around at an
  astounding rate.

  If you're interested in translations, please get involved.  The
  following groups are currently active:
     French translation       fr.koka.org
     German translation       de.koha.org

  To subscribe to a mailing list for one of these languages, please
  send email to koha-subscribe@<language site>
  (koha-subscribe at fr.koha.org for example).  Bear in mind, discussion
  on these lists is in the native language of the list, please respect
  this.  We're hoping to get es.koha.org and za.koha.org running soon.

  General translation discussions should occur (in english) on the
  koha-translate mailing list hosted at sourceforge.  This list also
  receives documents to be translated (such as this one).  If you want
  to translate a Koha announcement, please contact the author.  If you
  want to translate one of these newsletters, please do.  I ask only
  that you send me a copy of the translation so that I can post it to
  an appropriate website.

Community
  Last week we got a mention in the Biblio-tech monthly review (see
  http://www.biblio-tech.com/ for the story).  Rosalie Blake (of HLT)
  presented a talk on OSS and Koha to her local library association.
  We seem to be cropping up in the press more and more often.  If
  you're at all interested in helping keep us in the public eye (and
  getting a bit of press for yourself), please contact me to discuss a
  press release covering your recent decision to adopt Koha or your
  implementation of Koha.

  Thanks to those who responded to me about Linux, OSS, or Library
  conferences.  We're coordinating presentations now for at least four
  appearances.  We'd welcome more though, so please feel free to
  contact me if you're interested.  (Even making a presentation to a
  Linux or Perl users group would help.)

  There's also been another investment in Koha development.  An
  anonymous patron has stepped forward to sponsor a core developer's
  work on extending Koha.  With more organizations catching the vision
  of Koha as a cooperative effort, I think we'll be seeing more of this
  happen in the days to come.

120 day review
  Well, I've been serving as the Kaitiaki for about 120 days now, so I
  thought I might do a quick self evaluation and comparison against my
  stated goals.  When I initially talked about taking on the role, I
  laid out goals in three areas; Code Cleanliness, Feature Inclusion,
  and Koha Uptake.  I'll address each of these separately.

   Code Cleanliness:
  I had (and still have) a vision of a code base that's easy to read,
  easy to modify, and easy to verify.  There have been a couple of
  improvements in this area, but most of them have occurred in spite of
  my inaction.  I'm encouraged to see efforts at writing tests and
  programmer documentation, and plan on encouraging this effort as we
  move forward.

   Feature Inclusion:
  Koha has certainly seen a number of new additions; the installer, the
  upgrade script, templating, etc.  I hope that the RFPs from
  Nelsonville will spur both more development and greater sponsorship
  from other libraries.  With the recent start of the 1.3 release
  series, I think we'll be seeing a lot more changes soon.

   Koha Uptake:
  I think this has been the place where I've really come through on my
  vision.  I had wanted to put Koha in front of a lot of eye balls.
  With stories in a variety of press outlets, press releases, and
  planned presence at several conferences in the next six months, I
  think that we've really begun to establish ourselves as a valid
  option in the eyes of libraries.

  Overall, I think I've been successful in my role thus far.  I'm
  honored to have the opportunity to work with so many talented and
  wonderful people.  I'd like to especially thank Chris Cormack (the
  1.2 Release Manager), Paul Poulain (the 1.4 Release Manager), and
  Nicolas Rosasco (the Marketing & Recruiting Manager) -- without their
  efforts the last 120 days would not have gone nearly as well.

I hope that you're as excited about our progress as I am.  I really do
think that we're looking at a really bright future.

happy hacking,

Pat Eyler
Kaitiaki/manager
the Koha project