Kete Redevelopment Proposal

So pleased to be working with Josh and crew at Rabid on the Kete Redevelopment proposal:

"Today we are very pleased to announce a proposal to rally the community of Kete users to assure the future and walk down a path of improving the usability of Kete, and again make it attractive to the community serviced by our libraries.

The Redevelopment Proposal is the result of discussions with many of the community, and we are now publishing this for discussion. The funding goals seem large, but we believe moderate funding contributions can kick-start a major upgrade. When we deliver Phase One, we will have a modern, well-tested software base to start rolling out features to get you excited about using Kete again.

We have some introductions to make. I am Josh Forde, co-founder of Rabid in Wellington. I have been talking with Joann and Walter since early 2012 about the prospect of working with Kete. We love the values of the project and really see the opportunity to realise the potential of the software. Breccan McLeod-Lundy, technical lead at Rabid has experience developing on the Kete project in previous iterations.

There is one quick request we have to make. Our proposal references research from the UK presented at a recent NDF event. It states that approximately 90% of the archives of value in our communities are actually in private hands, which is a major underpinning value of giving community access to store their repositories in a digital form. We think improving the storage capabilities will be a major driver for users increasingly using Kete, and that they can be placing these assets in trustworthy hands in the libraries. We would love your assistance in sourcing this research, as librarians are not going to abide my lack of citation! The closest discussion I can locate online is here : https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ssoy/pubs/assscotland.htm - but it's not quite the clarity that would help put the value of Kete into perspective.

Aside from that, we need your input and dialogue. I have spent many hours over the past 4 months talking to supporters of Kete and planning out a path for the software's future. But you are the users who understand where you would like this project to go. A successful outcome for us involves us modernising the software, but also activating local software developers in new territories to contribute to an improving system. Ruby on Rails has widespread adoption and significant interest from developers. Again having a robust open source offering is certainly achievable and would reflect well on the New Zealand contributors.

So, over to you... looking forward to your comments.

Cheers Josh



Josh Forde on the Cuba Street Project and Kete from Rabid Technologies on Vimeo.