[Koha] [Koha-devel] Some more thoughts to add.

[MJ Ray]

Brendan Gallagher <info at bywatersolutions.com> wrote:
> Greetings from ByWater Solutions! I hope everyone had a great weekend  
> and mother’s day. I love the passion I have seen on this post over  

Well, it was a good weekend, but Mothers' day hereabouts was months ago...

> In regards to the pay-for-support listing page; I vote that the  
> companies be listed by location, which can either be implemented by a  
> linkable map or just listed by region. However, I also truly believe  
> that this should not be solely decided by the vendors and developers  
> of Koha, but by the users as well. [...]

I think a user-sortable list is the best way, with some sort of "by
distance" initialised by crude geo-IP detection as the default.
What's the point of having Plone there if we can't make this dynamic?

> I also have a question about the Koha-manage list. What are the  
> qualifications to be on this list?

As I wrote to someone else (Eric?), the list is past post-holders plus
invitees at the moment.  Not great, but reasonably understanable.

> I've sent several requests to join,  
> to no avail, and I have never received an answer as to why?

I think my "vote" was 0 = abstain, with a suggestion that Brendan be
invited in a few months because I'd not interacted with Bywater much
then. I don't know why this wasn't sent as an answer.

> [...] To me, having exclusivity to a list where  
> many of the decisions being made for the community are done seems  
> against the whole community/ open-source ideal.

Whoa!  Very few decisions are made there.  I think it started off as a
list to develop a proposal about the foundation and discuss some
confidential matters affecting the Koha companies on that list.

Community ideal perhaps, but if we look at open source, it is
littered with similar self-perpetuating by-invitation groups - we
should do better.

> For example, the  
> discussion of how to list the pay-for-support companies was completed  
> and decided on that chain and then changed on the community koha.org  
> website.

Whoa!  The discussion was not completed and the decision was taken by
LibLime, as recent posts should have suggested.

That said, I'm not sure why it was on koha-manage only.

> The escalation surrounding this issue may have been prevented  
> if all of the members in the community, some of whom this directly  
> affected, were allowed to be part of the discussion.
> I think many of us in the Koha community will be interested to see if  
> any of these discussions, suggestions and ideas actually yield any  
> results. [...]

Yeah, given the speed with which the website changed over, it's rather
disappointing to see no movement on this yet.  Guess that teaches us
where we stand, huh?

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef).  LMS developer and supporter for a small, friendly
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237