[Koha] Defining community participation [was: Koha demo links on koha.org]

[M. Brooke Helman]

Salvete!

      Maybe Paul will chime in, because I am fairly certain he could be a proper professor at some University since he can get dolts like me to understand stuff. This is a bit of telephone, since I've not actually used git, so do keep that in mind. Git strikes me rather like old fashioned FTP, with the important difference of revision control; if you and I both manufacture a car rim simultaneously, Paul can look at it and select the best, or maybe keep both, or perhaps toss them both as rubbish. (I pick on Paul because he has thick skin, and he really was a RM ;) 
       I learnt about git at the last Koha Con, so really, it's not some super secret arcane crippling demand for programmers. Even I was able to make functions for the linux login stuff I needed to do in college, and I'm fairly secure in my thinking that I could use git if I had to after hearing an explanation of it at Koha Con. I'd go so far as to say that you can probably make a function that will upload your file to git simply by pressing whatever key for the first command bits then typing your file name, but I might well be behind the times. You might want to take a look at

http://sysmonblog.co.uk/misc/git_by_example/

       which was linked from wikipedia to see what I mean. I would think that it's rather like dragging and dropping a file to the average programmer. It's just not that hard.

       To me, I'm reminded of making snowballs, snow forts, and snowmen as a kid. Sure, I packed a mean snowball, but if I got bored, or called back inside, or had to pack into school or what have you I could leave my snowball outside, and someone else could roll it about. To my amazement as I came back to my little snowball, it wasn't so little anymore. My sister, my da, one of the neighbourhood kids, who knows took it up for a little bit, rolled it around, and viola, suddenly I had summat I couldn't lift anymore and my eyes were wide. Technically someone else messing with my snowball was an added step, but man was that worth it. It was always the coolest when 5 or 6 kids got together when school was closed and we made a crazy fort in the backyard that was way bigger than the mischief we were individually capable of.
       This whole project is about doing a little at a time and having many eyes on the code. Setting an artificial velvet rope up takes it back from the open source mindset and back into the proprietary realm. It's like saying "No, no, your ideas aren't worth anything to us, we'll just give you our polished professional version once it's all done." Even if it's less rich, concise, or elegant.
       Owen in my experience has never discounted my ideas whole cloth. He might caution me that I want to do something foolish, but if I were clear enough about what sort of feature I was interested in having and he thought it would appeal to more than just me, he'd make it happen. Owen spent a lot of time at Koha Con essentially showing people how to do a chunk of what he does for free :D I like to think that he did this out of a sense of community in addition to a desire to not see Libraries have busted stuff between versions from being too fancy with the templates when an overlay will work. I might have missed the point, though.

        I'm not paid. That gives me freedom of action, but I try not to act like it somehow makes me better.

        The difference between LibLime and HLT in my eyes is night and day. HLT is in this for the social profit of the venture. They've been selfless in this. It's more valid to ask why BibLibre or Katipo are not being lambasted, from where I stand, since it's corpo to corpo. I think both BibLibre and Katipo were models for the community in how they behaved.

Cheers,
Brooke