I think a recruitment and training effort by the Koha community targeting potential programmers should be considered; I do understand the decentralized structure of the open-source community might make this difficult. Below I suggest one potential candidate pool of Koha developers.

I have an educational background that includes programming, but my general work history has been such that I have tended more towards network administration and management, so that my coding skills are rusty. If I had the time I probably could go back and figure out the Koha structure and start doing some development, but I have so much other stuff to do that there's no way this will happen.

However, at any given point in time I have 1-3 part-time tech assistants working for me, typically college computer science students that are passable programmers, and who actually do some programming here at work. I usually have enough hours available for them that I could have them working on Koha, maybe not designing new, novel features from scratch, but certainly coding simpler tasks, bug swatting or signoffs. The problem is the learning curve. These students work for me from 1-3 years until they graduate, and while they may be perfectly capable of writing a bubble up-and-down sort, a comprehensive understanding of a large application is outside their experience base. Me sitting down and working with them to do a dozen trial Koha installs and working with git and going over the documentation and then coding something is just too much of a time challenge and learning curve for all of us.

If it were possible, however, to have a training class, perhaps 15-40 hours, covering beginning Koha development, that might be a truly great thing. They don't need perl training, they pick that up quite easily. Same with databases--my last two assistants have been very good with MySql, and one was a real whiz with phpmyadmin. <alert-political/religious statement follows>But they don't immediately, intuitively understand an ILS, a simple thing like a database and an interface to the database that librarians have taken and cluttered up with arcane terminology and convoluted "stuff" so that they could call it an ILS and demand that only MLS degree holders get to have jobs and the title of Librarian and get to touch the ILS. </alert> It is frequently to my great amusement that I recall one of my military assignments working in a large database center where the lowest ranking individuals, several hundred of them I suppose, were the ones poking the database (cataloging), and working on terminals connected to a Burroughs mainframe database with no modern GUI.

Ideally it would be great to have this training I suggest in person, but that implies attendance at a conference where there are instructors, and that is a problem for the tech's part-time work hours, and Koha conferences are infrequent and geographically problematic. On site training would not be cost effective. Live video conference training might be possible. I'm much less enthusiastic about online training than the world at large, but reluctantly concede that may be the most feasible option.

I'm well aware that vendors are sometimes stretched thin and that training materials need frequent updating, so this would be a challenge. On the client side money is always a consideration, but I probably have enough in my budget that I could pay for a <em>modestly priced</em> class for my techs. A potential side benefit for instructors/vendors is that promising future employees could be identified.

Well, that's my input for the morning, now I need to go buy some plywood and glue it to the wall and attach my three T1 lines to it so they don't fall out of the ceiling and destroy the peace and harmony of the Internet before we get our ethernet/fiber connection when we stand-up our new Technology Center. See why managers don't have time for Koha development? We have to build stuff.

Greg Lawson
Network Administrator
Rolling Hills Consolidated Library
1912 N. Belt Highway
St. Joseph, MO 64506


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On 07/12/2012 06:50 AM, Ian Walls wrote:
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