Insomniac Librarians Why sleep when there's field literature?

Costing for Open Source projects is extremely fuzzy on very good days. In terms of actual dollars, my server cost me round about $700 for something that was more than sufficient to meet my needs at the time. I wanted to upgrade when I left due to age of equipment. Remember that you most likely aren't buying the Windows operating system, so that's going to save you about $200 right there. If you wanted to have someone build my server for you, it most likely would have run about $900 - $1100.

The singular person in charge of the project is the Kaitiaki. This is an elected position within the community, and very roughly translates to guardian of the sky, sea, and land. When I joined, that person was Pat Eyler. Nowadays, that person is Rachel Hamilton-Williams. This is less of a dictatorship, and more of a grass roots effort, but at the end of the day, the answer to the question "Who's in charge, anyway?" is the kaitiaki.

After that you have the release manager. The last release manager was Paul Poulain, the current release manager is Josh Ferraro.

In all seriousness, Koha truly is an international project, with the States truly being the new kid on the block. Again, the release managers were from

New Zealand
France

THEN

The US

The international flavour is a big chunk of what helps it progress so rapidly. For if yea, there is a developer somewhere who is not asleep, than it shall be advancing.

During the past few years of my association with the project, I have been simply alarmed by the exponential pace of development. This is one of the hardest things for a new user to understand since they don't know how truly no frills the original was.

As always, this workshop is participatory, so I'm going to need everyone's help. I would like all you Librarians to kindly relax and close your eyes. Picture yourself at the ocean, walking on the beach. Imagine this visualisation to be so very real that you can smell the salt in the air.

Now with no one opening their eyes, and this is critical so that this is an anonymous straw poll, I'd like the folks that have absolutely no clue what open source really is to raise their hands. No peeking!