Growing the Koha Community

by Brendan Gallagher on Jun 1, 2016

Chris Cormack spent sometime this morning talking about Growing the Koha community. Some brief thoughts from me.

He aha tō koutou awhina

On entering new features into bugzilla —> Tell the story be verbose. The patron gets a book from the shelf and then walk that to the desk and such and such is supposed to happen, and then this happens. So if you write the story developers can work with that.

Reports bugs, Ask for new things, answer questions on the mailing lists, Write documentation (proof reading, edits, spelling)…

Testing patches. (sandbox demo to follow today). Probably the biggest bottleneck is the number of patches that need signoff. We can write patches really fast – but it’s hard to get it tested and pushed. Attend hackfests to learn how to signoff on bugs! There are easy methods – sandboxes. https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Sandboxes

Write Patches… All can do that.

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Send cookies to Chris Cormack or other developers.

Hire developers, patches for peanut butter, biscotti, and/or beer. But seriously developers are interested in improvements for Koha and will work in many different ways to help. Hiring developers for pay is the most standard process.

We also talked about the importance of Hea (shared data about your Koha install – this is all submitted anonymously or you can choose to submit your name). This gives Koha people a chance to look at the features that are being used or not being used and developer towards the future. It also gives us a idea of the sizes of different installations of Koha around the world.

hea.koha-community.org

Koha academy is a program that Catalyst does that is 2 weeks long for high school students. They spend one week learning all sort of coding practices and then the second week they spend time with a Catalyst developer working on some projects. ByWater Solutions is in the process of launching a Koha University program were the idea is that Koha developers from ByWater will work closely with college students in Computer/Library related fields and some high school programs. The idea is to integrate Open Source into the curriculum at schools in the US.

We are in the last day of Kohacon and then we have 2 days of Hackfest after a day of for some local tourism.