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Sorry that it's been so long since I've put one of these out.  It
always seems like something else gets in the way, doesn't it?
Hopefully the breadth and importance of the news below is engaging
enought for you to forgive my lapse in sending things out lately.

Development:
  Paul is closing in on the next 1.3 release and Steve is plugging
  away at the next 1.2 release, but the biggest development news this
  time around is administrative.  We've decided that the 1.3 series is
  such a radical departure from the existing 1.2 stuff, that it will
  become Koha 2.0 instead of 1.4.  This release marks a watershed for
  us, and deserves the recognition that 2.0 will give it.
  Congratulations to Paul and everyone else who has been involved in
  the 1.3 work.


Community:
  Chris Cormack (the release manager for the 1.2 series) recently
  attended two conferences in Ohio, here's what he had to say:

   Well I think the trip went really well, Stephen and the rest of the
   NPL are feeling even more positive now.  The OLC conference was good
   lots of interesting topics and tho we were the last session on the
   last day. We still had about 20-30 people stay to listen about koha.

   Got to the think linux show the next day and got my pass and
   stuff. Listened to the Linux terminal server project and other thin
   clients. Interesting stuff for libraries, specially coupled with
   the cool serial over ip hubs they were showing off as well.

   Then came the presentation, I didnt end up using my slides because
   they were aimed at a more libraryish audience. So I talked about
   koha, explaining what a library system is to start :-) Then did the
   history of koha, were we are at now, how they can help, how to get
   it etc.  About 25 people listening.

   People drove in from Michigan and from Grandview Heights (near
   Columbus, Ohio), three to four hour drives for both groups, just to
   talk about Koha and how it might fit into their libraries.  (One of
   the libraies is a consortium that has a circulation of about 1.5
   million a year!  They'll both be in touch with NPL and Koha.

   All in all a very positive trip it was heartening how many people
   had heard of the project. And the guy from debian was keen to get
   koha into the distro.

  Koha also had a stall (manned by Katipo and HLT) at the 2002 Lianza
  conference http://www.confer.co.nz/lianza2002/ -- way to go!

  On a different tack, I'd like to welcome The Linux Box
  (http://www.linuxbox.nu/) of Ann Arbor, Michigan as the newest
  vendor offering commercial support for Koha.  If you are interested
  in supporting Koha, please let me know.  We'd be happy to add you to
  our support vendors page at http://koha.org/installation/support.html

French Koha:
  Paul Poulain has announced that demo.koha-fr.org and fr.koha.org are
  now live.  The first is a demo site where you can play with the
  emerging 1.3 series (it's especially nice to see that Koha is
  becoming bilingual).  The second site is the french language home
  for Koha.  These efforts are both huge wins for Koha in terms of
  visibility.

  Nicolas Morin wrote:
   And the other day I went to a formation session on library web
   sites:  it turned out every single librarian attending (a group of
   about 20 people from different libraries) knew that Koha existed :
   "isn't it that open source library system that's talked about?"

   So I think librarians awareness about Koha is good here in France :
   but to really take off we would need one first library to use it.

   I think what worked well in France so far is that, so to speak, we
   played a duet : one programmer who can answer questions about the
   software, the install, etc; and one librarian that can publicize Koha
   and get colleagues interested. Couldn't we try to set up such "duets"
   elsewhere?

  This does look like a good model to follow within our other language
  translation groups.  The french community Koha mailing list is up to
  51 subscribers, and there seems to be a great deal of work and
  excitement on it.

  Two last bits of news from the french koha community:
   * the templating of the OPAC now being over, translation of the OPAC
   will begin very soon : to start working on the translation of the
   software itself is obviously a major step towards implementing Koha in
   France.
   * This week also, Koha-France contributed a list of report features we
   would love to see implemented in Koha : see
   http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=ReportFeatures for this
   list. Any contribution to this list is welcome. If you want to get
   involved, the Koha wiki is a good place to look at :
   http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=KohaProject


thanks,
the Koha team