Rob Weir
On the 13 of December 2002, Rob Weir posted the first link to his windows packages for Koha. This begun countless volunteer hours spent packaging and testing windows installs. Packages were created all the way up to version 2.2.9. There is a current perl module dependency that is uninstallable on windows, which is blocking the packages for 3.0.x. I’m sure as soon as that is fixed, Rob will be hard at work creating packages again.
Windows users around the world thank you Rob.
Andrew Arensburger
Anyone who has ever looked at the Koha code will have noticed there is one module everything else uses, C4::Context. Back in September of 2002, this was not the case until Andrew wrote this neat module.
It has been poked at by a lot of people since then, but 269 lines of it are still the lines that Andrew wrote. It still retains the purpose it was written for to provide a single place to get things like config variables, system preferences and to implement database connection pooling.
With 163 commits to his name this was not all Andrew did, but it is probably the one that has had the longest lastest influence.
If you read this, stop by #koha on irc.katipo.co.nz and say hi sometime.
The article written by the wonderful Joann Ransom, with help from Rosalie Blake and I has been published in the latest edition of the code4lib journal.
In 2000 a small public library system in New Zealand developed and released Koha, the worlds first open source library management system. This is the story of how that came to pass and why, and of the lessons learnt in their first foray into developing in open source.
Have a read, and let us know what you think.
The Staff at Horowhenua Library Trust
Most people familiar with the Koha ILS will have heard of Rosalie Blake and Joann Ransom from HLT who played the biggest roles in creating Koha. What people probably won’t have thought about is all the other librarians and staff at HLT who all played major roles in the creation of Koha. I’m not going to name names because I may accidentally leave someone out, and causing offence is the last thing these posts were designed to do.
But be it the circulation librarians explaining to me how they circulate books, or them putting up with the occasional segmentation fault of the underlying C code in the circulation interace. Or the acquisitions and cataloguing staff spending countless hours explaining how they work to a programmer who just seems unable to grasp it 🙂 Or just the bucket of Cookie time cookies I got given for Christmas one year. All these things, and many more like them, are reasons why Koha exists and is successful.
This morning I was listening to “The little things” from Trinity Roots … it’s main line is “It’s the little things that really matter” and it is true, it is and always has been the Thank You’s and the smiles that have kept me working on Koha.
Anthony Mao
I’m not exactly sure when Anthony first became involved in Koha, I know it was before 2006 when he contributed a Chinese translation of Paul Poulains Logiciel documentaire. Anthony is a big part of the koha-taiwan group, which provides numerous resources in Chinese. He has played a big part in getting Koha installed in Libraries in Taiwan and also in mainland China. Including as far as I know, the first public library in China to be running Koha, Qin Xian County Public Library, in the ShanXi province.
So Anthony, I would like to say Xie Xie to you. (I tried to do it in chinese characters but the stupid database kept wrecking the utf8, I will have to fix that)
Roger Buck
Although Roger Buck was the 10th and first Australian committer to Koha, his real claim to fame was setting up and maintaining the first Koha wiki. But more than that, he actually put a lot of content on it. 🙂 He set the wiki up on the 20th of March 2002, and it lived there until it was shifted to it’s current home some 3 years or so later. Roger was also a frequent contributor on the mailing lists, helping out other users.
I’m gonna pull out the Australian stereotypes on this one and say “Bonza Roger”
Nicolas Rosasco – The first documentation manager
Nicolas first got involved in Koha way back in 2001, and by October 2001 had started work on a FAQ, some of which still remains on the koha wiki (its been shifted a couple of times) and on the koha.org site.
Apart from trying to collaborate and wrangle documentation, Nicolas always had a relentlessly upbeat and positive attitude to the community and was a joy to correspond with. Work needs unfortunately meant that Nicolas could not spend as much time as he would have liked to, or the community would have liked him to, working on Koha. But he can be sure that he did make a positive difference and that us oldtimers remember him fondly.
Mike Mylonas
Mike Mylonas first became involved with Koha in early 2002, a fellow Wellingtonian, Mike was influential in moving his workplace towards free software. Mike was the 12th committer to Koha, and while he doesn’t have a large amount of commits to his name, one thing he can certainly be proud of is the CPAN bundle he created and maintains.
Bundle::KohaSupport allowed users to install all the modules from CPAN that Koha depended on in one command.
perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::KohaSupport'
This made installing a lot easier.
So Kia ora Mike.
Pascale Nalon
Paul talked about Pascale and Ecole des Mines in our History of Koha presentation at Kohacon. But I think it is important to recognise the role Pascale has played in spreading the adoption of Koha, particularly in France. As Paul talked about during the presentation Ecole des Mines is a very prestigious institution and by them adopting Koha it gained a lot of notice.
Ecole des Mines and Pascale hosted the first Kohacon in 2006 in Paris, Pascale also came to the developers week in Marseille offering lots of useful suggestions and advice.
Since then Pascale has been very influential in setting up Kohala (the french Koha users group, which as of writing this is blacked out in protest of the 3 strikes law trying to be passed in France) and translating documentation into French.
I may be butchering the French language, but I’m going to try anyway. Pascale, Merci mille fois
Ambrose Li
Following on from Pawel and Benedyky, Ambrose took over maintaining and extending the translation scripts and helping out with localisaiton and internationalisation issues. But wait, there’s more. Ambrose has 453 commits to his name with a total of 8131 lines changed. That’s huge for a person who has never been employed by any of the Koha support companies, and as far as I know, has never been paid for any of his Koha work.
His first commit was back in January of 2003, and I’m 99% sure I saw him pop into the Koha meeting on irc yesterday.
Ambrose if you are ever in New Zealand, I owe you a beer (or beverage of your choice)
Kōrerorero 