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Keeping up with Kohacon20 – Episode 7: Day 6 and Day 7 Recap

2020-10-30

by Aleisha Amohia and Tosca Waerea

Kohacon is the annual international conference of the Koha software community, and in 2020, is being hosted in Wellington, New Zealand. We closed Kohacon20 with two days of DIY Koha, taking place over the weekend of 24 and 25 October 2020.

DIY Koha, also known as ‘Working together’, formerly known as a hackfest, was an opportunity to contribute to Koha, the global open source software project. We hung out together at Catalyst House, and were lucky enough to be joined on and off throughout the day by our international friends via videoconference. Some stopped by for a few minutes to say hello, and some stayed longer to work alongside us on their own projects.

Those attending in Wellington worked on a variety of projects across the weekend, both together and separately. Aleisha worked largely on rebasing recalls, Kathryn looked at improving the accessibility of Koha, David worked on documentation with Caroline Cyr La Rose via videoconference and then recalls with Aleisha, Chris worked on a proof concept for pulling in Wikidata linked data into Koha, and Hayley, Ollie, Alex, Evan, and Tal worked on writing patches. This was Tal’s first time attending Kohacon and their very first time writing patches (one of which has already passed QA, and two of which have been pushed up to the master version of Koha). It was such a great day!

We’re very grateful to those who shared their time to participate in DIY Koha both here in NZ and internationally. The way the community comes together to be supportive of one another is incredibly humbling to be a part of and to see.

DIY Koha was the perfect way to wrap-up our week-long conference! The Organising Committee is still processing a week filled with educational workshops, interesting talks, scrummy scrolls, and wonderful people.

Thank you to the team at National Library of New Zealand for providing a beautiful venue and a smooth in-person conference experience.

A huge thank you to the speakers, near and far, live and pre-recorded. We appreciate your patience while we re-jigged and revised the programme, and adapted for a hybrid in-person and online conference.

Thanks again to our sponsors – Catalyst IT, EBSCO, ByWater Solutions, Equinox, PTFS Europe, Linux Australia, FE Technologies, InternetNZ, LibrioTech, Flamingo, and the Library Bar. Without your generous support, we would not have been able to run Kohacon20 the way that we did.

A MASSIVE thank you to Rebecca for running the stream for the three conference days. Rebecca was a star, and handled everything thrown at her like an absolute professional. She is the entire reason those watching internationally were able to do so, and we can’t thank her enough.

And finally, thank you to everyone who attended Kohacon20! It was an honour to put on a conference for you all which celebrates community, especially in such a trying year. We hope that you enjoyed the conference, regardless of where in the world you joined us from. See you at the next one in 2021!