24.11 Team: The votes are in!

The Koha community recently elected their next release team. These individuals will drive the next six months of Koha development, helping us maintain momentum and achieve our shared goals.

The votes are in!

I recently blogged about the importance of the Koha community release teams and advertised the opportunity to join the next Koha release team for the 24.11 cycle.

I’m proud to say we are again well represented this next cycle, with PTFS staff volunteering to take on various duties. Please find below some of the highlights:

• Katrin Fischer, from BSZ in Germany, will be continuing for another cycle as the release manager.  It’s not unusual for this important role to run for two cycles; it takes a little work to get into the rhythm so we often find the second cycle is very productive.  She will be assisted again by some of our former release managers including myself.

• Lucas Gass, from our friends ByWater Solutions in the USA, is stepping into the role of ‘Stable’ release maintainer. He’s stood strong in release maintainer roles for a few cycles now and is taking the deep dive into the very important ‘stable’ branch role this cycle.
• The 23.11 (oldstable) version will be in the very capable hands of Fridolin Somers, from Biblibre in France.
• New for this cycle, Martin Renvoize is stepping into the Quality Assurance Manger role.  Quality assurance is vital to the community process and keeping the produce stable and on track.  Martin hopes to guide the team to some new practices and increase their throughput by switching our algorithm from ‘oldest to newest’ to ‘most recently worked on’ so we can “catch developments whilst they’re hot” and encourage quick iteration and action to feedback.
• Pedro Amorin and Matt Blenkinsop are both joining the Quality Assurance team this cycle. These two have come a long way in the last year and I’m really glad to have them aboard in these vital roles.

• Matt Blenkinsop is also standing as the ERM expert. He’s really developed a solid knowledge of ERM and the underlying technologies used in this state of the art module so is standing as ‘the go to man’ for all questions ERM.
• Jacob O’Mara is taking on the role of ‘Bug wrangler’ after having been in the Aspen world for a while. He’ll help keep our bug tracker under control, squashing bugs and helping filter and prioritise the submissions
• Aude Charillon is stepping out of the Documentation manager role, but supporting the newcomer Philip Orr, from LMSCloud Germany, in that role whilst she re-joins as a Documentation team member so she can focus on writing the docs.
• Rasa Šatinskienė is joining the Documentation team.
• Jacob O’Mara is joining the Koha Docker Development team bringing his knowledge of Docker learned during his time working on Aspen to the team here.

These people really help to shape both Koha and the Koha community during their 6 month feature cycle and I’d love to see more of our customers getting involved in the future.