The next few days will be pretty intense for me, as I’ll be joining friends old and new for the hackfest of the 2013 Koha Conference. Hackfest will be an opportunity for folks to learn things, including how to work with Koha’s code, how and why librarians do the things they do — and how and why developers do the things they do. Stuff will be broken, stuff will be built up again, new features will be added, bugs will be fixed, and along the way, I will be cutting another alpha release of Koha 3.14.
Unfortunately, not everybody will be able to be sitting inside the conference room in Reno for the next three days. How can one participate from afar? Lots of ways:
- Read the koha-devel mailing list and join the conversation. I will, at minimum, post a summary to koha-devel each day.
- Follow the #kohacon13 hashtag on Twitter. Tweet to us using that hashtag if you have a question or request.
- Look for blog posts from hackfest.
- Join the #koha IRC channel.
- Keep an eye on changes on the Koha wiki, particularly the roundtable notes and hackfest wishlist pages. If you’ve got additions, corrections, or clarifications to offer, please feel free to let us know or to edit the wiki pages directly.
- Watch the Koha dashboard for patches to test and to see the progress made during hackfest.
- Test and sign off on patches. BibLibre’s sandboxes make that super-duper simple.
Hackfest isn’t just for folks who know their way around the code — if you know about library practice, or have time to test things, or can write up documentation, you can help too!
We may also try setting up a Google hangout. Because Google Hangout has a limit on the number of simultaneous users, if you’re interested in joining one, please let me know. If you have suggestions for other ways that folks can participate remotely, please let us know that as well.
Happy hacking!