Kohacon13: Yes, but what have you done for me lately?

by Jesse Maseto on Oct 18, 2013

Chris Cormack from New Zealand gave a great presentation at KohaCon13 on what Koha means to him and how we all can help. Chris is one of the original developers of Koha, He started working on Koha in Sept. of 1999 and has not stopped yet.

Chris talked to the point of Koha being a FREE system, but FREEDOM isn’t free. The amount of work and man hours that has got Koha to where it is now is pretty amazing. As of now there has been 10,835,325 lines of code written, which equates to 222 years of accumulative work time done on Koha. Which is very monumental for an open source project.

For the thousands of people that use Koha, many of you might not know how you can give back to Koha. You can speak up in the community. Join the IRC channel, Koha mailing lists, and talk about your experiences with your previous ILS systems. Let everyone know your story, why you left them and why you have chosen Koha. Users can log into BugZilla, update tickets and help bugs and enhancements get into Koha. You can also encourage freedom in all aspects of your life. The reason Koha can grow is because it is free and open source. You should support and use all and any open source products like Firefox etc. etc. Another way you can give back to Koha is to sponsor developments and follow through with these developments to make sure everyone can benefit from this and they actually make it in to Koha. Also Koha needs the community to test patches and bug fixes. The thought behind this is that if you test and help someone else’s patch get into Koha, they will test and help your patches get in to Koha. This will enhance your karma is the community and make others want to help you in return.

Chris finished with a great video that shows how passionate and what Koha means to him. The video is “Frosty Man and The BMX Kid” and is about how a grumpy old man and a young Maori boy come together on a cliff top to eat some ice-creams and do some bombs. My take away from this video is that Koha is Chris’s Eden and that is why he always comes back to the Koha conferences and is so passionate about Koha.