Category: Koha

Do believe the hype

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.

Heading Home

I’m currently sitting in the airport waiting to begin my flights home, got here early as 4 of us were leaving Dallas today and it didn’t make sense to all take seperate taxis. Instead David gave us all a ride and Thomas and I watched as Paul and Nahuel checked in and cleared security. Thomas and I then had lunch and talked for a few more hours before his flight, and now I’m waiting for mine.

I just wanted to note down some things I am taking away from Kohacon 09. Apart from the things I briefly mentioned in my previous post there were a lot of other good things that happened.

Users helping users.  There was not a single session I was in where users weren’t answering questions that other users had, with the occasional help from a developer or two.

The community feel. It was to the credit of everyone involved that there was no us and them feel to the conference. Vendors, Developers and Users (sometimes all 3 being the same person :)) mixed and interacted in a way that you would not find at a proprietary software conference.

The Development Weekend. Galen Charlton deserves huge praise for the way he ran this weekend, maximising the time we had available and directing the discussions in a way such that we didn’t get bogged down. By the end of the weekend (well it was really 3 days) we had patches from 3 new developers, and Nicole was sending some of her first code patches. Bugs that had been annoying people for a while were fixed and lots of interesting discussion was had.

So a big thanks to the organisers, and to all the attendees. Videos were taken and are in the process of being converted to a format suitable of being hosted online and all the slides are planned to be linked from the wiki. So anyone who missed out on being able to be there will be able to read the slides and/or watch and listen to the presentations. The dev weekend discussions were summarised on the koha wiki also.

I’m looking forward to getting home and being with my family again, but I’m a little sad to be leaving also. A lot was achieved, mainly in building relationships, I now feel I am going home having made a lot of new friends. Our challenges are to keep the lines of communication open and public and to continue to grow our community.

Librarians, Developers, Steaks, Baseball and good friends

Kohacon 2009 is nearly over, just one day left of the developers conference tomorrow, then just Paul, Nahuel and I will be left.

As far as I’m concerned it has been a resounding success, lots of faces put to names, tons of interesting presentations, and to date a very productive development weekend.

The highlights for me

  • The enthusiasm and excitement of all the participants
  • Galen’s sense of humour.
  • Staying up late chatting with people in the Holiday Inn dining room
  • Baseball!!!!
  • Meeting people I talk to on irc almost daily
  • Catching up with Paul again and meeting Nahuel

A lot of the other attendees have done great write up’s on the individual sessions so I encourage you do check them out.

There are a ton of photos on flickr here.

Kohacon 2009 next week

I’m busy trying to tidy everything up, and to forget there is a small possibility my wife will give birth while I’m away, before I head off to Kohacon on Tuesday.

Today Kahurangi and I went out to upper hutt to Nan and Koro’s house to bake hot cross buns with Donna and Manaia. Kahu and Manaia rolled the buns and helped to put the crosses on the top, they turned out suprisingly edible.

Tomorrow is Dad’s 65th birthday party at Le Marche Francais which should be fun, then I have to go into work to grab all the things I forgot. Like my cellphone charger, headphones etc, yes I am a goober. Then I have to finish off my presentation, get an adapter for the video out on my netbook, and copy it to a usb stick just in case.

Laurel is writing me a shopping list, and I have a baseball game and numerous lunches and dinners to go to, so I’ll be pretty busy, but I’m sure it will be fun.

Request for photos of Libraries using Koha

Paul Poulain and I are doing the first presentation at Kohacon 09 which is coming up in a few weeks. As part of my part of the presentation I hoping to do a bit of a montage of libraries using Koha.

So far I have some photos from the Cook Islands, Samoa, China, Croatia, India, France and New Zealand.

So this is a call out to you Australians, Americans, Canadians, English, Germans, Polish, Hungarians, Kenyans …. and all the places I have forgotten that are using Koha. I would love to get some photos for use in the presentation. I will put up the slides and the movie online after the conference.

More great Koha news from India

A few neat things have come up on the mailing list in the last few days.

The first one is gnunify.in where Koha is being presented.

The second one is K’s Helping Hand. A fantastic idea to help make it easy to install and use.

How it all started?

Prashant contacted me about wanting to setup Koha at his place of work, but they have no Internet access. We ended up putting together on discs, everything that’s needed to setup a server and Koha

Koha is infectious, and more people want it. So, we created some video tutorials and DVDs. Now, they are available to anyone that wants them…

Why?

This is our way of contributing back to Koha, spreading the word, and making sure more people can find and use this fantastic FOSS for libraries.

And lastly and announcement has just hit the list for www.granthalaya.org. A union catalogue of of public libraries in Konkan region Maharashtra, India.

We have five libraries to start with.We aim to cover as many of the hundreds of public libraries in the region as possible. The site is on Koha 3.0. Our heartfelt thanks  to the Koha community for making this possible.
Through it we also aim to help public libraries in the region to
automate and standardize their operations by helping them switch-to / install Koha, help them to migrate their data from other software to koha, help them convert their Indian Language catalouges into Unicode, train the staff to use koha for all library operations. Ultimately to interconnect all libraries on same platform.
Please do visit www.granthalaya.org and let us have your feedback,
suggestions and help.

Kohacon 2009

The creators and developers of Koha, the first open
source Integrated Library System (ILS), today announced that KohaCon
2009– a conference for current and interested users of the Koha
Integrated Library System— will be held in Plano, Texas, April 16 &17,
2009.

KohaCon 2009 is the sequel to the first ever KohaCon–held in Paris,
France in 2006– which brought together users and developers worldwide.
KohaCon 2009 will feature an international slate of speakers (both Koha
users and active Koha contributors) conducting presentations and
workshops on a diverse range of topics. Topics will include technical
information on how to develop for the various modules of Koha, support
options, and even panel discussions featuring users of Koha talking
about their experiences with the software.

“We expect this event to have wide appeal,” said Paul Poulain, BibLibre,
CEO and Release Manager of Koha 2.x

“The conference is for both techies and non-techies. In addition to
presentations on the technical side of Koha, the conference will serve
as a hands-on introduction to how users and developers around the world
collaborate to make the Koha open-source software possible,” Poulain
explained.

“Kohacon 2009 will be huge, everything is bigger in Texas. Plus you
get to hear from some of the veteran Koha developers, complete with
funny accents. What more could you want?” said Chris Cormack, one of the
original authors
of the Koha version 1.0, and current Translation Manager for the Project.

This is a FREE conference. There is no registration fee, but conference
organizers are requesting that all attendees pre-register using the
registration form found at:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pMSkZuQLLHD_R8MFCGWz4OQ

Details (travel, hotels, tentative agenda, etc) can be found on the Koha
wiki at:
http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=kohacon2009

About Koha

Koha is the first open-source Integrated Library System (ILS). Gifted by
Horowhenua Library Trust and now in use worldwide, its development is
steered by a growing community of libraries collaborating to achieve
their technology goals. The impressive set of features available in Koha
continues to evolve and expand to meet the needs of its user base. Koha
has lived up to its name, which means ‘Gift’ in the Maori language of
New Zealand.

To learn more about the Koha project, visit:
http://koha.org

Press Contact:
Paul POULAIN
http://www.biblibre.com