[Koha] Release Manager Introduction

[Joshua Ferraro]

Hi everyone,

Briefly, I'm Joshua Ferraro (kados on IRC) and I'm the new release
manager for 2.4. Thanks everyone for your support!

We had quite a lot of activity at our Town Hall meeting yesterday
which tells me folks are still interested in the project -- I'm
also sure that there are folks out there still itching to get
involved but who aren't sure how to get started. If one of those
profiles fits you ... get ready ... there's lots to be done and
we'll be depending on you to help ... ALL of you.

So, first off, if you missed the meeting you can read the whole
transcript here:

http://koha.org/cgi-bin/logs.pl?recall=recall&saved_query=Town%20Hall%20Meeting%2020%20May%202005

My TODO list is here:

http://wiki.liblime.com/doku.php?id=koha24rmnotes

Please feel free to add to/comment on the TODO: it's a scratch
pad for now. I'll be moving stuff to the official Koha wiki as 
things get more organized and definitive.

Speaking of organization: before I commit to any deadlines or
features to be included, I'd like to organize a few meetings for
'focus groups' to discuss each major 'component' of Koha 2.4.
Based on the discussions I will select a 'manager' for each 
component who will be responsible for ensuring the success
of that component.

Here are the components:

Website/Interface Design
This group discusses the overall user experience of Koha: the
official website, colors, logos, and interfaces of the OPAC
and Intranet. As new features are introduced, the interface
designers will ensure that the features meet the Koha standard
for usability, beauty, accessability, and standards compliance.

Documentation
This group discusses documentation in Koha: user manuals, wikis,
code documentation, etc. If you're not a programmer yet, consider
writing docs for something not currently documented.

Internationalization
This group will be responsible for ensuring that Koha can 
accomodate multiple languages -- they discuss things like
utf8 (did everyone see the latest version of Marc::Record now
supports utf8), translation of templates, website, etc.

New Features
This group discusses new features to be added in Koha 2.4: what
we can realistically acomplish, who can finance it, and who
can program it. NCIP, Consortium Support, PLucene, etc.

Quality Assurance and Bug Squashing
This group will be responsible for making sure that the 2.2 code
is bug free and that any new features are bug free. If you don't
have coding experience you can start by noticing bugs and 
pointing them out here. And if you are learning to program, you
can hone your skills by spotting other folks mistakes ;-).
 
So ... five groups to start with. The New Features group is the
'catch all' group for now. There's obviously some overlap here
so if you've got a better idea for how to organize our groups
I'm all ears. Following this email I'll start threads for
each group so we can begin discussions. I'll be chairing
all the initial meetings (unless Rach would like to share the
load) until I appoint a manager for the group.

I'd like to make sure that everyone who wants to participate in
a group can attend -- I realize this is tricky with us spread
around the globe as we are. I've considered signing up at
meetup.com where we could vote on the time of the next meeting
but before I do that, does anyone know of a free service that
would meet the same purpose?

In addition to our 'focus group' IRC meetings, we'll have
a monthly IRC Town Hall meeting (a brief one), weekly bug
squashing meetings, and weekly updates from me on how things
are proceeding. Stay tuned for details on when these will
be happening.

A word about our international friends. If you are not fluent in
English, but you still want to contribute, please do! I can
read French, German, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese (slowly), so 
you can email me if you would like to get involved.

That's all for now. 

-- 
Joshua Ferraro               VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
LibLime                  Koha ILS, Mambo Intranet, DiscrimiNet Filter
jmf at liblime.com |  Full Demos at http://liblime.com  |  1(888)KohaILS
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