Kohacon14 Day 1 – Community Organisation

After a great lunch, Paul was up to talk about the community organisation. He talked about the differing wants and needs of developers vs users, and how to reconcile these.  Paul made these following points:

• Why is the community important? The second thing (after checking the software works) is how does the community work, because the longevity of the project is directly related to how the community is structured.
• Koha used to do feature based releases, sometimes causing major delays, since Koha 3.4 we have been doing time based releases
• Time based releases work well, it is predictable.

How does Koha manage these releases, it’s all about people.

• Release Manager – person responsible for the next major release
• Release Maintainer  – person responsible for bugfix/maintenance release
• QA Manager – responsible for checking for code quality as well as functional requirements
• Doc Manager – responsible for documentation
• Translation manager
• Packaging manager
• Any other roles you can think of

But we also need tools

• Mailing lists
• IRC
• Wiki
• Bugzilla
• Jenkins (Continuous Integration testing)
• Koha dashboard
• Pootle (translations)

And we need workflows.

Paul also covered what he sees as weaknesses in the community.