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.

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.

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.

The folks have liblime have created this neat ad, which is up on http://www.koha.org as well as their site. Please spread it around, and link back to the press release at

http://koha.org/about-koha/news/nr1233775168.html

You can read the full details at here or on the homepage.