Unsung Koha Heroes – Part one : Olwen Williams
When I was working on the Koha history doc leading up to the presentation at Kohacon I noticed that there were some contributions that I would like to make special mention of. This of course is not to try and rank anyones contribution over anyone else’s or to detract from the already well recognised contributors. But there are some people who made significant contributions to Koha and I would like to recognise that.
Olwen Williams is a huge reason why Koha exists, without her and her knowledge of pick based systems we might still be struggling to get the data out of the old library system 🙂 She enabled Horowhenua Library Trust to feel confident, by getting the data out of their old system and getting it into the new relational database. Not content to stop there, she also wrote a significant amount of the code that was to become Koha 1.0. She was the second person ever to commit code to Koha and occasionally still answers a question on the mailing list.
Olwen if you read this, hats off to you and thank you very much for all the hard work you put in.
Kōrerorero 
Thank you Chris for the kudos. Somewhat spookily I’ve just completed a six month PICK contract. When I was offered this latest contract I thought “oh no”. Turned out I did mostly analysis with just a small amount of coding. As soon as I started coding it all came back to me.
LikeLike
Great post Chris, I love that you are reminding us of how much we owe to these early Koha folk.
LikeLike