[Koha] Number of Koha Libraries in the World

[Nathan Curulla]

Hi Everyone,

I hear what you are all saying about this and agree that it would be better to roll our own, but here is the thing: Hea is not user friendly at all and the Wiki is not a good marketing tool because it is not pretty (no offense on either of these). If you really want to market Koha you need to look at these things from the eyes of a non-developer, non-tech oriented librarian. If you do that you will see that these two tools are not optimal, especially in comparison to something that larger companies that Koha competes with are going to put out. 

It is good to hear that you want to clean things up and re-invent the wheel, but actually doing that in a reasonable amount of time in a competitive environment is another thing. If someone has a concrete proposal for an attractive, sortable, searchable, easy to submit to option on the website for libraries to put information in than I think that would be great and I will do everything to help that I can, but who is going to do it and when? With products like Folio coming Koha needs to be front and center in the open source library world and showing the world how many people use it is a no brainer (and should be easy) in terms of ways to do just that. 

So the options are that someone volunteers to create this interface (ByWater staff can help with this if given the access and permission, but we aren’t going to do it alone) with a completion target of end of Feb. 2017, or we link out to a third party site that already has the content. If we don’t hear from anyone about the former we are going to go with the latter. We need to move on this kind of stuff soon or Koha will be left in the dust in the coming emergence of open source in the library world. We need to become more accessible to those who don’t code, otherwise we are playing into the misconception that open source is for developers only.  

Respectfully, 

-Nate

> Nathan A. Curulla
> Owner, CRO
> ByWater Solutions
> Support and Consulting for Open Source Software
> Headquarters: Portland, OR.
> East Coast Office: Redding, CT.
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