Koha Sponsoring Discussion

This is a late post, but I wanted to write down some information from the sponsorship talk that occurred on the last session of the Koha Con users conference(April 17, 2009).

There was a heated discussion in regards to the best way for the community to get better about informing each other what projects are being sponsored and how best to do resource sharing. It was agreed upon that the community would use the existing to Bugzilla (http://bugs.koha.org) to input enhancement work and sponsored development. Since Bugzilla doesn't include fields for all the information we'd like to see about sponsored development features it was suggested that there be a sort of template/example bug placed so that others could see all the information that needed to be included into the comments field.

Many people are hoping that with this method if someone doesn't have money to sponsor development or would like to help partially fund a development it will make it possible for others who are also interested in the idea the add feedback or even contribute.

I like this idea, however, ultimately I would like to see a better tool developed as it could have a very positive impact on the Koha community. If there were a way for vendors to bid on features directly from this tool and a way for libraries or individuals to contribute to the feature right from the browser, it would just make the entire process much easier and efficient. You would be able to have a meter or similar feature to say something like, "Only $200 left needed to sponsors this project". It will also make it easy for people to vote and make certain feature requests more of a higher priority without having to search through the thousands of bugs in bugzilla. This type of system could also have a method for people to say I have $1000 to offer for this project, who would be interested in developing it.

Does this type of service exist anywhere is there any type of open source tool similar? Could this be a website with support for many different projects to organize their development efforts?