Darla Grediagin
Darla has been using Koha from 2006, for the Bering Strait School District in Alaska. This is pretty neat in itself, what is cooler is that as far as I know, they have never had a ‘Support Contract’. Doing things either by themselves or with the help of IT personnel as needed. One of Darla’s first blogposts that I read was about her struggles trying to install Debian on an Emac. I totally respect anyone who is trying to reclaim hardware from the darkside 🙂
Darla has presented on Koha at conferences, and maintains a blog that has useful information, including sections of what she would do differently. As well as some nice feel good bits like this, from April 2007
I know I had an entry titled this before, but I do love OSS programs. Yesterday I mentioned that I would look at Pines because I like the tool it has to merge MARC records. Today a Koha developer emailed me to let me know that he is working on this for Koha and it should be available soon. I can’t imagine getting that kind of service from a vendor.
Hopefully she will be able to make it Kohacon13 in Reno, NV. It would be great to put a face to the email address 🙂
Last night on IRC the Koha Community elected a new release team, for the 3.12 release. Once again it is a nicely mixed team, there are 16 people involved, from 8 different countries (India, New Zealand, USA, Norway, Germany, France, Netherlands, Switzerland) and four of the 12 roles are filled by women.
The release team will be working super hard to bring you the best release of Koha yet, and you can help:
This is perhaps going to sound a little whiny and maybe it is, but I’ll feel better for having written it. Working in a community of volunteers you soon discover a right way to ask for help and a wrong way. Normally I try to apply the one free pass rule, and of course in an international project like Koha there are bound to be issues with language differences. But lately there has been a disturbing trend in demanding help.With a Free Software project, there are of course always areas to improve on, and no project should be offended at people pointing that out, or asking the same questions again and again. Where the problem occurs is in tone. People who work on Koha are being paid to, and in that case it is usually being paid to satisfy a clients needs, or working as a volunteer, or most often as a combination of the two. So for them to spend time on answering your question, that means time away from who is paying them, or from their family, or some other part of their life. A lot of us do this willingly, but there are only 24(ish) hours in a day, so if you want your question to jump to the front here are some handy tips.
Here endeth the whine.
On Friday the 15th of May a large group of current and prospective Koha users got together a the NZ Treasury for the second ever NZ Koha users group meeting. So first off I’d like to thank Treasury for making the space available and Hannah and her helpers for organising and running the day so smoothly.
I think there were 60+ people there, from about 25 different organisations all with differing levels of knowledge about Koha. Despite the varying levels I think the programme shaped itself (it was run mostly as an unconference) into something that worked for everyone there. One of the highlights for me was that during the question and answer sessions, a lot of questions were being answered by other Koha users.
The show and tell section went well too, with NZICA, LGNZ, and The family violence clearinghouse all showing off what they have done with their Koha. I got a kick out of seeing the LGNZ one, as it was something I had worked on in 2003/4, it was great to see it still in use.
I got the opportunity to try out my Kohacon presentation on a real live audience and I think I didn’t even bore them too much.
The day ended with drinks and nibbles, sponsored by Catalyst IT, and lots of great chatting. I always say the talking between conference sessions is the best part of any conference and I think it was the same again.
This week I get to follow up on all the emails I said I would send, and hopefully watch a lot of nz libraries become more and more active in the Koha community. Thank you to everyone who attended for making it a great day.
Owen is not so much an unsung hero, but definitely one that could be sung about more. With a massive 1701 commits to Koha, the first one being in March of 2003, Owen is one of the oldest and most prolific developers.
Owen specialises in UI and UX work and writes a blog that is invaluable to anyone working on Koha look and feel. What makes it even cooler is that Owen works for a library, not one of the many Koha support companies. That not only makes Owen cool, but it makes his library super cool for understanding the more you put into Koha, the more you get out.
So thank you Owen, thank you to your family, and to Athens County Public Libraries.
In April 2012
Here are the people who did the sign offs
