Article from kohalabs.com (English)

Same article (French)

Same article (German)

Koha website (English)

From the article: "Koha is really taking off in France. Last summer, frenchman Paul Poulain took on the role of Release Manager and Lead Developer of Koha 2.0. Shortly thereafter, Nicolas Morin joined him to manage the french translation effort. While it's difficult to measure the exact size of the french speaking Koha community, we do know that the french language Koha mailing list now rivals the english language list in size and dwarfing the other language specific lists by a factor of eight.

"One of the recent developments in France is the involvement of Group ESIEE. They are a graduate level school, which supports the Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie de Paris (CCIP) by providing highly skilled technical workers in the Paris region. They are also part of an international exchange program allowing their students to study and work in other countries around the world.'

"Group ESIEE currently has four developers working on Koha. Serge [Renaux] is the Koha project manager and oversees three students; Jerome Vizcaino, Michel Lerenard, and Pierre Cauchois in their work on Koha. Jerome and Michel are both fourth year Computer Science students and are near the end of their three month internships. Pierre, a second year student, is just beginning his.

"Koha has left a mark on Serge and his students as well. Pierre has commented that, 'Working with interesting people from all over the world has been the best part of the whole thing. I hope to continue working with Koha after my internship, if my studies will allow it.' Serge too sees involvement in the community as a long term commitment. While Jerome and Michel don't think they'll have time for Koha next year, they both thought that they'd learned a lot from it. 'I've been able to work on a complex database and to learn more about Perl. Also, the people from the Koha team were always cool and helpful', said Jerome. Michel added, 'Working on an open source project and working with people from different countries has been great.'

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Pat Eyler of koha.org comments, "'Koha in France' is now on the English page as well as the French and German pages. This is important for a couple of reasons. First, it looks at the uptake of Koha in France, which is the first large-scale, non-English series of deployments. Second, it describes a model which the group believes is going to become more pervasive -- universities picking up Koha as their library system and as a teaching platform. The students at ESIEE developed ldapKoha.

"Also of note is that rssKoha, a beta tool that allows a Koha library system to set up specific kinds of reports to publish in the RSS format, has been released. Some examples of how it could be useful include a list of the most recent acquisitions in a catagory (like mystery novels, or DVDs), a list of the most frequently reserved/requested items in the collection, or (for librarian use) a list of the least
frequently checked out items in the collection. This is important because
it opens up a new kind of visibility into library collections."

If your'e interested, be sure to keep an eye on the Koha's news website, which been
created to begin tracking developments and announcements about Koha.

Once again, we find that the highlight of the project for at least one of the participants is the sense of community which he felt while working on the project. As we continue to point out, this is the most significant sociological implication of Open Source Development to watch, and it is a world-wide phenomenon.

- Willy Smith, reporting from Costa Rica, with Pat Eyler from Seattle, Washington, USA.