Hi everyone, Briefly, I'm Joshua Ferraro (kados on IRC) and I'm the new release manager for 2.4. Thanks everyone for your support! We had quite a lot of activity at our Town Hall meeting yesterday which tells me folks are still interested in the project -- I'm also sure that there are folks out there still itching to get involved but who aren't sure how to get started. If one of those profiles fits you ... get ready ... there's lots to be done and we'll be depending on you to help ... ALL of you. So, first off, if you missed the meeting you can read the whole transcript here: http://koha.org/cgi-bin/logs.pl?recall=recall&saved_query=Town%20Hall%20Meeting%2020%20May%202005 My TODO list is here: http://wiki.liblime.com/doku.php?id=koha24rmnotes Please feel free to add to/comment on the TODO: it's a scratch pad for now. I'll be moving stuff to the official Koha wiki as things get more organized and definitive. Speaking of organization: before I commit to any deadlines or features to be included, I'd like to organize a few meetings for 'focus groups' to discuss each major 'component' of Koha 2.4. Based on the discussions I will select a 'manager' for each component who will be responsible for ensuring the success of that component. Here are the components: Website/Interface Design This group discusses the overall user experience of Koha: the official website, colors, logos, and interfaces of the OPAC and Intranet. As new features are introduced, the interface designers will ensure that the features meet the Koha standard for usability, beauty, accessability, and standards compliance. Documentation This group discusses documentation in Koha: user manuals, wikis, code documentation, etc. If you're not a programmer yet, consider writing docs for something not currently documented. Internationalization This group will be responsible for ensuring that Koha can accomodate multiple languages -- they discuss things like utf8 (did everyone see the latest version of Marc::Record now supports utf8), translation of templates, website, etc. New Features This group discusses new features to be added in Koha 2.4: what we can realistically acomplish, who can finance it, and who can program it. NCIP, Consortium Support, PLucene, etc. Quality Assurance and Bug Squashing This group will be responsible for making sure that the 2.2 code is bug free and that any new features are bug free. If you don't have coding experience you can start by noticing bugs and pointing them out here. And if you are learning to program, you can hone your skills by spotting other folks mistakes ;-). So ... five groups to start with. The New Features group is the 'catch all' group for now. There's obviously some overlap here so if you've got a better idea for how to organize our groups I'm all ears. Following this email I'll start threads for each group so we can begin discussions. I'll be chairing all the initial meetings (unless Rach would like to share the load) until I appoint a manager for the group. I'd like to make sure that everyone who wants to participate in a group can attend -- I realize this is tricky with us spread around the globe as we are. I've considered signing up at meetup.com where we could vote on the time of the next meeting but before I do that, does anyone know of a free service that would meet the same purpose? In addition to our 'focus group' IRC meetings, we'll have a monthly IRC Town Hall meeting (a brief one), weekly bug squashing meetings, and weekly updates from me on how things are proceeding. Stay tuned for details on when these will be happening. A word about our international friends. If you are not fluent in English, but you still want to contribute, please do! I can read French, German, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese (slowly), so you can email me if you would like to get involved. That's all for now. -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Koha ILS, Mambo Intranet, DiscrimiNet Filter jmf@liblime.com | Full Demos at http://liblime.com | 1(888)KohaILS