Koha – Kōrerorero

Kohacon19

ranginui — Sun, 26 May 2019 23:39:03 +0000

As is always the case this was the best Kohacon yet. Dublin is a fantastic city and the hospitality of Interleaf, PTFS Europe and the Dublin Business School is second to none.

The conference was held at the Dublin Business School, who are big champions of open source and open access. The school uses Koha, Moodle, Shibboleth, eprints (and I think others I have forgotten). It was spread over 5 days, 2 of presentations, 2 of workshops, and one day of cultural activities.

The talks were uniformly excellent, covering a wide range of topics, from Business analysis to migration stories. One of my favourites was Marcel giving the best non technical talk about containers (docker mainly) I’ve ever seen.

The workshops were also well received, with my favourite being the one on plugins.

But the best part was again the people. Kohacon are about kanohi ki te kanohi, about restrengthening bonds and creating new ones. It’s vitally important that online communities make the most of any in person time they can.

And because it’s me I’m going to finish with food photos.

Unsung heroes of Koha 34 – David Nind

ranginui — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 07:48:52 +0000

David Nind is one of a kind. Neither he nor the organisation he works for use Koha, but he has been active in the community for many many years. He helps with maintaining the wiki, running the twitter account, answering many many emails on the mailing list, attending user groups and so much more. The … Continue reading

Unsung heroes of Koha 33 – Joy Nelson

ranginui — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 20:19:14 +0000

Not only does Joy describe Bibframe by using the ontology of Tutu, but she probably currently knows the most about data migrations to Koha. This would be neat in itself, but she never hesitates to share this knowledge by answering questions on the mailing lists, attending and speaking at Kohacons, and participating on IRC.
Joy is a person of great integrity and she brings that to her work on Koha. The community and the project are lucky to have her.

Unsung heroes of Koha 32 – Josef Moravec

ranginui — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 22:34:24 +0000

I have never met Josef, but according to git it has been 685 days since his first patch was accepted into the Koha code base. He now has 42 patches with a total of nearly 3000 lines changed, which in itself is a great achievement. But even more importantly, Josef is a committed tester. He is currently leading the number of sign offs for April, and is second only to Marc Véron (unsung hero number 31) in terms of sign offs for 2017.
Jo Ransom met Josef in the Czech Republic while on her Koha world tour and speaks highly of him. If I have this correctly he works for a University that has been using Koha for quite a few years now. It is so great to see users becoming contributors also.

Děkuji Josef

Koha 2016 – By the numbers

ranginui — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 00:11:07 +0000

I did a little infographic showing a brief summary of 2016 for the Koha project, hope it is useful/fun for someone.

Help an artist out

ranginui — Tue, 18 Oct 2016 19:33:49 +0000

As most of you will know I have been working on Koha since 1999. Most of you will also know that without others at the beginning like Rachel, Simon, Olwen, Rosalie and Jo Koha would simply not exist. What people people might not be aware of though is that the one person who has been with me throughout the whole 18 years, that Koha has been worked on, is my wife Laurel.
She wasn’t my wife when I started in fact we had only recently met. But the stories of my Koha journey are intertwined with my relationship with Laurel. Without her constant support I would have given up a long time ago. A few years ago I wrote an unsung heroes of Koha post about Laurel.
Without her support I would never have been to travel the places I have, do the work on Koha I do in the weekends and evenings and so much more.
All of this is a long lead in to say that now Laurel needs your help (only if you are in a position where you can of course). Laurel is an art educator and an artist. Neither of which, unless you are incredibly fortunate, are careers that provide much in the way of financial rewards.
Laurel has battled a lot of health problems throughout her life and her art is one way she deals with it. She is currently working on 2 shows to exhibit
And is currently fundraising to cover a small part of the costs. We’d love to be able to cover the costs ourselves but unfortunately we can’t. So if you want to help Laurel out (and be part of making some fantastic art) which indirectly helps me out, which indirectly helps Koha out, please do. And if you don’t we’re still friends

Boosted fundraising site

3 Conferences in 3 weeks

ranginui — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 09:28:54 +0000

Somehow (most likely due to my inability to say no) I ended up attending 3 conferences (and speaking at 2 of them) in 3 weeks. Two of them in Australia and the third in India. Apart from being really really tiring they were all great.

First up was Linux Conference Australia, held in Geelong (an hour out of Melbourne). It was a full week conference, with the first 2 days being miniconfs then the next three conference proper. I attended Open Source and Bioinformatics, and the Community Leadership Summit X at LA miniconfs. They were both excellent, Bioinformatics was something I knew nothing about beforehand so I learned a lot. The Community Leadership summit was really good, due mostly to the attendees. The programme was great as it always is. I spoke on Thursday, I think it went ok, there was a good write up at LWN. The social track was a highlight (drinks in a brewery are always fun) as well and I met and talked to a lot of lovely people.

Next up, I caught the train to Melbourne, and enjoyed some of the lunar new year festivities over the weekend.

On Monday, we gave an Intro to Koha talk in Melbourne, which was really well attended.

Followed by a bunch of meetings then a Koha user group meetup and dinner after. The Koha user group meets in the Melbourne Athenaeum, a fantastic place.

The next three days were the VALA conference, a definite change of pace to LCA, but interesting nonetheless. I didn’t get any photos during the conference, but of course I got some photos of some of the fantastic food on offer in Southbank.

On Friday Kris and I visited the National gallery, which had a great exhibition of Warhol and Ai Weiwei, then flew back to NZ. I had the weekend with my family, and on Monday morning flew out to India to the National Koha Conclave.

Catalyst Open Source Academy 2016 – Koha Group

ranginui — Mon, 25 Jan 2016 07:38:34 +0000

Once again the Catalyst Open Source Academy was a great success. Thanks of course to the students, but also the tutors, mentors and organisers. I won’t talk too much about the first week here, I am sure that will be covered by others, but I wanted to talk about all the work the Koha team got done.

I had a great group of students, who worked really hard and got a lot done. The group work started great as the first day was Chloe’s birthday and she brought in a delicious cheesecake.

Myself, Aleisha and others from the Koha community had prepared around 40 issues for the students to work on. But by the end of the day they had already dealt 14 of them and were speeding up. This was just in the afternoon, as getting a working development environment took most of the moring. Which meant I spent the evening finding more work to do, not a bad problem to have.

Day 1

Setting up the development environment
12 new patches for bugs
2 existing patchsets signed off

For day 2 I had what I thought were trickier issues that should take most of the day to solve, but nope they still got through way more than I expected.

Day 2

Made new favicons for the Koha wiki
Some html/css changes to scoreboard.koha-community.org
Changed the theme on the Koha dashboard back to normal, not xmas
16 new patches for bugs
4 existing patchsets signed off

After another evening of scrambling to make sure I had plenty of stuff for them to do, we got into day 3. I had actually managed to get some quite tricky ones, which meant that although it looks they did less, they actually worked just as hard, but to solve much trickier problems

Day 3

Fixing up any of their patches that had failed QA previously
9 new patches
1 existing patchset signed off

Onto the final day, this was just a half day, as the afternoon was taken up with the students presenting what they had done, and a capture the flag security competition.

For something different, I got them to use Gource to create a movie visualisation of the work they had done that week. Here are two of them

They also signed off a few more patches, and even added a few new patches also.

In summary they were a super productive group of 4 young people, and I hope they continue with their interest in IT, the NZ IT community would be lucky to have them. Here are some quick stats from git.

39 patchsets created
A total of 271 lines added, 95 removed (delta 176)

All of them have at least one patch in Koha now, and I expect that of those 39 patches, almost all of them will make it in.

I just want to finish with a big thanks to Aleisha and Francesca who helped out a lot, and to Kathryn, Liz and Lucio who held down the fort upstairs.

Oh and here’s some pics of “Chris pointing at things” It seems I do this a lot at the academy.

All pictures in this post are Copyright Catalyst Open Source 2016 – Licensed CC-BY-SA (2.0)

Unsung heroes of Koha – Compilation

ranginui — Sat, 02 Jan 2016 22:08:06 +0000

I’ve decided to put a list, that I will keep updated to make it easier to find the unsung heroes posts, so here goes

Kohacon15 – Nigeria – Round up (You should have been here)

ranginui — Sun, 25 Oct 2015 07:38:02 +0000

As is the trend for all Kohacon, this was the best Kohacon yet. Not only was the venue great, but so were the people and the presentations.

It flew by so fast (that’s how you know it was interesting) and we covered so many topics. From Automation uptake in Nigeria, to sysadmin tips, to RFID, to digital resources and so much more.

One of the major takeaways for me was the passion and the willingness to discuss and share ideas. There certainly are challenges here, with unreliable power, not great internet, and of course as it is libraries, funding. But what there isn’t here is any sense of fatality, people are working hard to make things better, and to serve their users to the best of their ability.

Apart from the conference proper, for the cultural day we went to ‘The Sacred Grove in Osogbo, Osun” which is a world heritage site, and for good reason.

We probably didn’t get as much done at the hackfest as we could have, but the internet made that a little hard. We did though explore some monitoring tools that can help deal with the symptoms of the unreliable power. I hope that it was some use to the participants.

In conclusion, I would like to say it was an honour for me to be here, I hope that I provided some useful information for others, I certainly learnt from them. A big e se to Projectlink Konsult, and to my work Catalyst for making it possible for me to come. And e se to all the other participants who made the conference what it was.

You should have been here.