[Koha-devel] RE: [Koha] LITA national forum

[Brenda Chawner]

Bonjour Paul, and hello everyone else

I'll be going to this, and would be happy to report back on sessions that would 
be of interest to Koha participants. If anyone else on the list is going, 
perhaps we can arrange to meet at the conference and have a chat about Koha and 
open source software in general.

Paul asked "who is Brenda?". I am a lecturer in library and information 
management here in New Zealand, and teach courses in information technology and 
business information sources. I have been following Koha developments for a 
while now, and hope to be more involved with the project in the future.

Here is the abstract for my presentation at the LITA National Forum 2003:

Abstract/Outline:  What is involved in managing and participating in a 
distributed open source software development project? What options are 
available for organisations that choose to implement open source software? 
Koha, the world's first open source library management software package, was 
originally developed for the Horowhenua Library Trust, based in Levin, New 
Zealand, by Katipo Communications Limited, in Wellington, New Zealand. It was 
released as open source software under the GPL in 2000, and there are now 27 
registered developers (and 84 subscribers to the development discussion list) 
working on new releases, in New Zealand, Canada, the United States and France, 
Poland, Germany, Spain, and New Caledonia. The Koha kaitiaki (project manager) 
is  in the state of Washington, USA. Koha is currently being used by libraries 
in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, and the United States, and 
people from India, and South America have also expressed interest in it . This 
session will cover the various Koha participant roles (such as project manager, 
developer, documenter, user), as well as the range of tools and techniques used 
by Koha participants to communicate with each other, using a case study 
approach.  These include email discussion lists, IRC, and a wikiwikiweb (or 
wiki for short), as well as a bug tracking utility.

I wrote the abstract quite a while ago, and know that the number of developers 
and list of countries using Koha are out-of-date - I hope to have these updated 
for the presentation. I expect that the handouts from the talk will be 
available on the LITA website following the conference - I'll send the URL to 
the list when (and if) it's available. 

You might also be interested in the bibliography of articles and other material 
about open source software for libraries I have made available at

http://www.vuw.ac.nz/staff/brenda_chawner/biblio.html

I hope to have an updated version of the bibliography done by the end of 
September.

--
Brenda Chawner
School of Information Management
Victoria University of Wellington
P O Box 600
Wellington  NEW ZEALAND
(04) 463 5780        fax (04) 463 5446        address@hidden