“A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.” (Sir Barnett Cocks)
The above quote comes close to describing what I was thinking as I watched the OLE Project’s Webcast from November 20th, 2008.
Months of consultations, hundreds of thousand of dollars spent ferrying people here, there, and everywhere…all to produce a design document. That’s a poor ROI. Only after July 2009 will they even begin to think about developing a new ILS, by which time:
- Evergreen and Koha will have evolved and improved; the OLE Project will still be months away from the rubber meeting the road.
- Evergreen and/or Koha may very well adopt any ideas the OLE Project outlines in their final “Open Library Management System” document before OLE can get started on actual development work.
It wasn’t a webcast. It was an Adobe Flashcast. I didn’t discover that until too late. That doesn’t bode well for “open”.
Do you have a feed of Koha posts which I could add to the Koha Community Blogs? If so, please email me.
You have a quote there. A committee can strangle death out of a good idea. On the other hand, it’s far from true that the converse is a guarantee to success. Still it makes a nice quote to start a blog entry. Nice hook.
But on your 2nd bullet. I think this is an excellent point and not a bad outcome, either. OLE is doing all of our planning in an open atmosphere, as open as possible and still manage the logistics of gaining broad input. OLE Project fully intends to share the outcomes. If the outcomes are useful fodder for other projects, I see that as a win. Hopefully, and I expect, it will be a positive influence. It’s certainly been a positive experience so far. Those committees contain a lot of interesting bits. I hope adopting ideas is at least one of the outcomes of the OLE Project.
It’s also worth restating — as OLE Project mentions often — we do not see ourselves as being in competition with Evergreen or Koha. One of the our mantras is noting that adoption is important. While some folks may see adoption being a direct outcome of excellent programming. I think social forces are just a tad more complex than that. So we are unabashedly working on adoption, while talking about issues important to institutions as they relate to enterprise software needs in research libraries. While also talking about needed transformations in library workflows. In other words, I think it’s undeniable that more good work needs to be done before the chapter on Library OS software can be finished.
What do you see as important adoption challenges for some of the existing OSS apps? And what will it take to gain more research libraries use of this class of software — to meet the road with the proverbial rubber?