Hello All - Good day to everyone!
At the Koha Community Hackfest held in Marseille, France on 8th - 12th
April 2024 community members once again raised the topic of governance and
sustainability of Koha. Prior to that meeting Brendan Gallagher and
Jonathan Field had done some background work to look into the prospect of
putting the Koha project into a foundation. Although this is something that
members of the community have explored previously, the feeling is now that
the landscape has changed and it’s a good time to revisit this topic.
There are numerous benefits of moving Koha into a Foundation for the long
term sustainability of this Open Source Project. Koha is a mature, very
large project and represents 177 years of collective work (hours) of
development time (https://openhub.net/p/koha) First of all we think
everyone should stand up and celebrate that fact - this project is
Awesome! One of the big advantages of putting Koha into a foundation is
that we can start to have a more formalised governance structure - which
will improve our communication and our development processes. In addition,
we will be protecting Koha for future generations to come.
Part of the exploratory work involved talking to some community members,
support organisations, non-library specific foundations, and looking
at the Open
Library Foundation <https://openlibraryfoundation.org/> (OLF). This
included talking to an open source project (VuFind
<https://vufind.org/vufind/>) that has recently joined OLF, as well as a
discussion with the current President of OLF (Tom Cramer
<https://openlibraryfoundation.org/about/leadership/>).
We presented this work to the Hackfest on 10th April 2024 to the assembled
gathering. There was a large consensus for the need of a foundation and
that OLF would be a good home for Koha. There was a request that we hold a
vote to include a wider audience of Koha libraries, community members, and
support organisations in the decision. We would therefore like to submit
the following proposal:
“Open Library Foundation (OLF) should become the home for creating a new
Koha Foundation spot. The structure of the OLF is that each project
establishes its own legal identity where each project can create governance
models that fit for their open source project, establish banking accounts
for fund raising and supporting community focused programs, allow for
consolidated technology resources (website, bug tracker, mailing list
forums, etc.), and have legal advice/practice available to support and
protect the project.”
Before putting this proposal to a vote, we would like to leave a window of
opportunity to ask questions and discuss. We have included the background
and research that we did, please take a look at the document (attached).
Once you have digested this information please feel free to discuss via
IRC, post questions to the Koha mailing lists or join the new chat facility
at https://chat.koha-community.org/. There is also a Koha community meeting
on the 15th May
<https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Development_IRC_meeting_15_May_2024>where
any questions can be answered.
Alternatively, contact brendan(a)bywatersolutions.com or
jonathan.field(a)ptfs-europe.com who would be happy to take any questions you
may have.
After a period of discussion, we will send out a link to a vote. We would
request that as many members of this community who have an interest in the
future of Koha participate in this vote.
Cheers and thank you,
Brendan and Jonathan
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Brendan A. Gallagher
brendan(a)bywatersolutions.com <info(a)bywatersolutions.com>
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