Dive into insights on the power of collaboration in the GLAMR sector and how events like KohaCon24 enable meaningful collaboration.

Ideas flourish when shared. When communities collaborate toward a common goal, bringing with them their resources, experience, and passion, the GLAMR sector can thrive. The global Koha community aims for the Koha library management system to solve problems and present opportunities for many kinds of organisations and their collections. The project's open source nature enables unique innovation and collaboration, is amplified at the regular gatherings, including KohaCon. KohaCon is an annual conference for users and contributors of Koha from all around the world.

In 2024, Aleisha Amohia, Rōpū kohinga technical lead, had the pleasure of attending in person. With over ten years of experience, Aleisha has contributed to the Koha community in different ways, including release maintenance, bug wrangling, translation, documentation, and software development.

KohaCon24: learning and building together

In 2024, KohaCon was held over five days in Montréal, Québec, Canada. It was a valuable opportunity to:

• understand how Koha is used in unique and creative ways
• generate support for new ideas or changes to the platform
• grow and strengthen the global community of Koha developers, supporters, and users
• have strategic conversations in person.

The formal conference portion of KohaCon took place over the first two days. The conference program consisted of presentations from Koha libraries and support companies. For Day Three, KohaCon24 hosts inLibro arranged activities throughout the day to show off their city and culture. Days Four and Five were the hackfest portion of KohaCon, where attendees joined discussion or development workshops, and spent their hours ‘bug squashing' – writing and testing code and working through the Koha bug report queues. The conference days were at the Amphitheatre of the Coeur des Sciences, a cultural centre within the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). The hackfest was at the Goethe-Institut Montréal, a German language and cultural centre whose library uses the Koha platform.

KohaCon24 was the community's first fully bilingual conference, with presenters having the option to present in English or French. Attendees were given headsets so they could receive live English or French translations during presentations. This made an immense difference for everyone and was highlighted repeatedly, including by Aleisha who said "There is unmatched power in being able to give and receive information in your language". Learn how to make Koha accessible to your users in their preferred language.

The conference was also streamed live so people could engage online from anywhere in the world. This is a tradition that began when Catalyst hosted KohaCon in 2020 and has made the conference and its content more accessible.

Conference days

Days One and Two were packed full of interesting presentations. Highlights for Aleisha included hearing about built-in features of Koha that she hasn't seen or used much, such as:

• Koha preservation module
• Koha bookings feature
• The three different options (currently) for facilitating rotating collections within Koha
• Koha interlibrary loans module.

There were also fascinating presentations from various Koha consortia and user groups about who they cater to and how they work. Aleisha also enjoyed hearing an update from Marseille Hackfest 2024(another annual gathering of the Koha Community), and some useful methods and practices for quality assurance and testing.

Journeys through Koha

Aleisha participated in a panel on Day Two discussing ‘Journeys through Koha' alongside fellow Koha developers, Marie-Luce Laflamme and Brendan Lawlor. All with varying levels of experience contributing to Koha, they shared their first memories with Koha, lessons learned, memorable projects, and more. Aleisha shared how she's seen the values that both Brendan and Marie-Luce enjoy about the Koha community – collaboration and the sharing of knowledge – exist naturally in both the Māori worldview and in libraries.

Koha – not your average library system

Aleisha took to the stage again to present ‘Koha - not your average library system'. The presentation started with the Koha origin story and described the many ways that Koha could be more than a library services platform. Aleisha shared examples from the community showing interesting and creative ways to use Koha, including from the organisations who work directly with Catalyst. Some of the highlights included:

• Using the circulation module (checkouts and checkins) for stock management, to track the movement of an item through locations and stations
• Making the most of Koha styles and CMS tools to design the catalogue website to look like a knowledge hub or resource centre
• Using a discovery layer such as VuFind to provide a cohesive, integrated search for multiple databases, including the Koha catalogue and
• Empowering Indigenous communities and stories with Koha through translations, support for diacritics, offline circulation, and more.

Watch Aleisha's full presentation.

Whakawhanaungatanga and water cooler chats

Whakawhanaungatanga is a concept from the Māori worldview describing the process of building relationships. While a global software community has many benefits, it can be hard to get to know each other beyond the contributions to Koha. There are ways to connect easily online, but it doesn't always flow as freely, especially when you've never met. Spending time together kanohi-ki-te-kanohi (face to face) is a key part of KohaCon and enables more meaningful collaboration, which is great for the development of Koha.

KohaCon24 attendees at the end of Day 2 taking a group photo on the conference stage.In between sessions, attendees could enjoy donuts, puzzles, coffee, tea, and plenty of chatting and catching up. The cultural day activities included a mountain walk, a tour of the central library, visiting an Indigenous art centre, a ferris wheel ride, and a microbrewery tour. Often KohaCon attendees only see each other each year at KohaCon, and sometimes many years can go by between the events people are able to travel to - there was lots of hugging and laughter in the conference break room.

Building together

As a Koha developer, Aleisha had been most looking forward to the hackfest portion of KohaCon. It was exciting to have two uninterrupted days to work on tricky bugs with fellow Koha contributors, prioritise together, and even onboard new contributors.

Whilst speaking on the panel on KohaCon24 Day 2, Aleisha recounted her experience developing a built-in recalls feature for Koha. "[The recalls project] is so memorable to me, because it took five years to get upstream. The version that we finally got upstream was a massive community effort", she remembers. By this stage, three of Catalyst's partner libraries had sponsored different parts of the recalls feature. The Koha community's support was necessary in testing, adding follow-ups, and strategising around what would be required to release the feature.

During the hackfest, Aleisha had conversations about advancing the recalls feature and other developments Catalyst is working on. She spoke with fellow developers and users of Koha. These collaborative discussions ensure:

• incoming changes in Koha reflect the needs and desires of the community
• any changes are well documented, understood, and communicated
• contributors have an opportunity to present their side and justify their changes and
• the Koha system stays secure and operational.

These workshops in environments such as KohaCon enable the Koha project to grow intentionally. Koha is used for different types of libraries and collections, big and small, membership-based or public, single branch to country-wide consortia, because it is designed to do so. All developments in Koha have been requested by a person or organisation, so each enhancement solves a problem for a real user. Due to the vast potential for development, it takes collaboration and compromise for the community to prioritise fixes and enhancements for each release. And with major Koha releases boasting hundreds of new features and fixes, it's clear that the Koha community's methods are progressing the project for its users.

The power of collaboration in the Koha community

In nearly 25 years of Koha, it has developed and evolved drastically. Through the power of collaboration and the dedication of the Koha community, this library management platform has responded to the changing needs of the information sector, enabling the applications of Koha to become so varied. If you have an idea for Koha, Rōpū kohinga at Catalyst are happy to collaborate with you to bring it to life.

It's an incredible pleasure for the Koha community to have spaces such as KohaCon to come together, share their contributions, and celebrate the growth of the project. KohaCon25 will be in Wellington, New Zealand. Subscribe to the Catalyst Rōpū kohinga newsletter for updates.