The Koha Community rocks!

Absolutely flippin brilliant day ....

Early this morning a Koha Community meeting was held to discuss, yet again, the community assets problem. The whole LibLime thing is still dragging everything to a near-standstill .....

But today, well the community just said enough - in the nicest, most polite way possible - we took back control of our community to make sure we had the tools we need to keep Koha rockin' along. Its just a temporary measure mind, just until the whole LibLime - PTFS thing is settled and PTFS have had time to work out what their customers want and what they want to do etc etc. And while we understand and are happy to give them the time they need to get their stuff sorted out, we need to still be able to function as a community.

The biggest problem over the last 18 months has been the lack of access to the koha.org site and having no way to expose the up-to-date Koha information, news, demos, documentation, pay for support options etc.

www.koha-community.org
Anyway, the big thing to come out of the meeting was the decision to make a new temporary website for the Koha community, to carry us through until the LibLime/PTFS thing is sorted. We brainstormed names, voted, grabbed a domain and within a very short time - like a few hours - we have a community website again!

irc has been an amazing place to be today. Developers and users and vendors all working together, volunteering support, hosting, mirror sites, content, testing - whatever they could and whatever was needed to get a Koha Community place up and running again. Liz Rea has done an incredible job on the website - and so fast!

The news just got better as the day progressed:

• Galen tagged v3.02.00-alpha in Git, thereby kicking off the alpha period for 3.2, with a tarball to be available tomorrow,
• Chris showed us the git stats which highlighted how many people have been making commits; the work on Koha over the last year has truly been the work of many many hands.

Today I saw in action all that is good in an open source community; and the Koha Community rocks!

Woo hoo: Koha Con 2010 bus trip

So I am thinking it would be really nice to meet people coming into Auckland for Koha Conference and drive them down to Wellington. We could take a few days for a quick detour through Rotorua and heartland NZ, driving down through the North Island via Levin.

Current thinking is:

Day 1: arrive in Auckland, dinner at the harbour area.
Day 2: travel to Rotorua (3 hours ish) afternoon at Te Puia thermal area, Maori cultural night in the evening, spend night in Rotorua.
Day 3: drive down the island, afternoon tea / civic reception at Levin (4 hours drive), travel to Wellington for evening meal and the night.
Day 4: either a spare day in Wellington or day 1 of Koha Conference.

So what do you reckon? If there is enough interest I'll grab some indicative pricing together.

Users vs developers : not in my universe!

Today I went to Wellington to have lunch with Bob Birchall, CEO of Calyx, and Chris Cormack from Catalyst IT. Through a serendipitous crossing of paths we were joined by Simon Blake from Citylink; Rachel Hamilton-Williams, CEO of Katipo Communications; Mason James, CEO of KohaAloha and Brenda Chawner from Victoria University.

Thats 1 user, 1 Academic / FOSS commentator, a network engineer and 4 Koha vendors. Driving back home again I got to thinking about this group in relation to the discussion on the Koha list about users vs developers.

Owen Leonard has written very eloquently about this and I have used below big chunks of his email to the Koha list made in response to a comment made that Koha "users" and "developers" are at opposite ends of a pole.

Owen:

"I'm a Koha user. And in using Koha I saw that I could make Koha better, and in time became a Koha developer. There is no Koha developer out there who is developing Koha features just because they think it would be cool to do. Koha developers are doing their work because they *see* a need, in an actual user or an actual library. Or developers are getting paid by libraries to develop the features the libraries need."

He goes on to list the occasions when users and developers are in opposition:

• "When a company decides to develop a feature that they think will help sell a product, even though the feature doesn't meet any actual need,
• When a company throttles or cripples a feature in a product because they want to charge extra for a particular feature."

Now I have been around Koha for a decade now and I agree with Owen that no self-respecting Koha developer or Koha support company is doing that kind of stuff.

The LibLime experience has hurt the Koha community in the States. I get the distinct feeling from reading various blogs and help requests on the Koha list that LibLime clients have been having a hard time of it, hence their very valid wish to gain more of a 'users' voice than they have had in the past. I suspect this applies more specifically to Liblime clients than Koha users in general though. It is also a real risk when Libraries abdicate responsibilty for their own systems by handing it over to a vendor: a traditional client-vendor relationship.

Brenda mentioned today that her research is indicating that contributing to FOSS projects has a direct correlation to satisfaction levels. This is a critical point and one which I raised in the presentation Chris and I made at LIANZA 2009.

As librarians we are comfortable with a traditional client-vendor relationship. But the times are a changin folks and as librarians we have to change to. We need to be taking back control of our industry tools; Dewey and Ranganathan were both librarians and the originators of Evergreen and Koha were librarians too.

We have to learn new ways of working if we are going to maximise the value of Koha to our organisations:

• think about what you WANT not what we are given,
• learn basic system admin skills and take responsibility for your own Koha 'settings' to customize it for how YOU want it to operate,
• become comfortable with irc as a networking and community meeting tool,
• become skilled at identifying, describing and reporting bugs, and then testing the fixes,
• think 'what if' and log enhancement suggestions,
• and then join the discussion to ensure the developers understand what you want and how you want it to work, and work out how to make it fit into the main development trunk,
  
• fund a developer to 'do' if if you aren't a programmer yourself,
• learn to ask for help and give help to others,
• share your thinking and decision making processes, tips and tricks and inhouse resources like staff training tutorials or videos,
• become adept at collaborative working on wikis,
• fund work for the 'greater good' not holding it selfishly to yourself,
• and co-fund significant developments with other organisations to share the cost so we all benefit.

I'll leave the last word to Owen:

"Let's get together as users and/or developers and figure out how we can get some stuff done. Let's put together a structure by which Koha users can spec out new features and get them funded, collectively. Let's put together a structure by which Koha users can communicate with their vendors without fear of exclusion or reprisal. Let's not talk about a users group breaking down some barrier that isn't really there; let's talk about strengthening and leveraging the connection that we already have!"

Personal MBA reading list

I came across Josh Kaufman's Personal MBA site on Lifehacker a few months back and I'm thinking it would probably be a very good personal goal to read my way through his recommended book list one title at a time .... or at least 1 book from each section :)

Marketing your library - 1 restroom enquiry at a time

Loving being on holiday; I'm almost caught up with my blog reading now!

Just read this geat article by Diane Zabel and Lorraine J. Oellack, guest columnists on rusq.org

Its about the importance of customer service and recognizing that every single interaction - even if its just showing the way to the restroom - is an opportunity to market your library:

"If you are tired of hearing “where’s the restroom?” then maybe it’s time to rethink your choice of jobs or how you perform it. Simply put, either stop working at a public help desk or take the challenge to rejuvenate your patron interactions and become a positive face for your library."

Thinking about The Bookends report.

The thing about being on holiday is that inbetween bouts of reading historical fiction, swimming at the beach and general carousing I actually get time to catch up on professional reading. More importantly, I get time to think about what I've read.

I have spent 2 days - on and off - reading, digesting and discussing "The Bookends Scenarios : alternative futures for the public library in NSW 2030". This a really interesting and challenging piece of work which is very, very timely. I heartily recommend it as a good read - and excellent after dinner discussion!

My response to the Bookends Scenarios follow.

1. ROI on investment in Libraries.
The library profession must define what the social needs of our society are and how we can add value thus demonstrating the social return on investment in libraries. This needs to be done nationally and the provision of free public libraries by local authorities must become a legislated social necessity like potable drinking water, sewerage disposal and roads.

2. Collaboration.
I am more convinced than ever that open standards and open source is the way of the future. The LSynCNZ work on a nationwide library management system for NZ is hugely timely and important work. I urge District Librarians not to rush off forming adhoc local consortia of 3 or 4 territorial authories which greatly weakens the viability of LSynCNZ and just delays the inevitable. Lets not be afraid to think of the big picture. Huge open source consortias operate all over the world and NZ really is small fry in terms of geographic spread, population, items and loans.

3. Staffing of Libraries.
As librarians we must reskill - constantly - in order to stay relevant to the society we serve. Professional registration is a great initiative. An aging population will compound the current problem of finding suitably skilled library professionals - which we must do if we are to remain relevant to the society we serve. We need to 'audit' the skill-set of our staff, identifying gaps and move immediately to an ongoing training development plan to move staff to where we need them to be.

4. Service Models.
We need to completely redesign our service model for the future. Issuing books has not been our primary purpose for many years, and will become proportionately less significant over the years to come. We need to define the roles and programmes and services we will offer, and redefine these every few years to ensure we keep relevant in changing times.

5. Spaces.
We have 2 new buildings in the pipeline in Horowhenua and this is an excellent opportunity to ensure we design community spaces as "The Third Place", as hearts of the communities we serve.

6. Leadership.
Libraries must embrace the changes demanded in changing times - this is non negotiable. 'Servant leadership' of an exemplary standard will be required to lead Councils, communities and staffr forward. Library managers will need to skillfully push, pull and drag 'old school' librarians into the 21st century librarianship and bravely know when to call it quits and let go those unable to change.

The cost effectiveness of Open Source for HLT

Horowhenua Library Trust recently underwent a review and one of the recommendations raised in the final report was to assess the cost effectiveness of Koha and Kete for Horowhenua Library Trust. The tables above tells the story really.

But you can view the whole slideshow below.

Introduction
coz it makes no sense without painting a picture first :)

In 1983 I was quoted $3,000 to have a wedding dress made by a bridal shop in Wellington – no way my Mum could afford that dress. We would have to make it
ourselves.

So we went into Fitzroy’s, an old fashioned draper's shop in Levin, and within minutes of hearing that I was marrying a local lad, “Nancy’s boy”, we were surrounded by a clutch of woman: comparing fabrics, discussing how to adapt the paper pattern, which lace, what size seed pearls etc … I’m sure you get the picture. That dress turned out heaps better than anything I was thinking of – and saved us a fortune too!

That was my first grownup experience of crowd-sourcing, group think, community consultation, collaborative design – call it what you will. What I learnt that day was the power of community ownership, adaptation and the sheer power of collaboration.These are key concepts in the open source world.

Cost effectiveness of Open Source development for Horowhenua Library Trust.

View more presentations from jransom.