Among the tougher proprietary platforms for Open Source to gain ground in, consumer mobile devices is arguably the toughest. Google is hoping to challenge that with the release of their Android mobile computing platform and the first phone to use it, T-Mobile’s G1. Maybe now is the time to replace that chunky Nokia 3650 I’ve been hauling around for 7+ years…

I’m attending the NISO forum on collaborative library resource sharing, and heard a cautionary tale about making sure that a software project meant to be open source actually gets there.

Gail Wanner from SirsiDynix spoke today about the Rethinking Resource Sharing Initiative, an effort to revolutionize sharing of materials and services among libraries and their users. One of the products of the initiative was a Firefox plugin called GoGetter (previously known as GET-IT) that could grab information about a book from a web page and give the user a list of ways to get it, including online bookstores, the local library, resource sharing networks, Google Books, and so on.

A proof of concept was ready by June 2007 and was successfully demonstrated. However, work on it stalled — while the plugin was meant to be open source, apparently not all of the institutions involved in writing it (or employing the programmers involved) were prepared to let it go. Over the past year, various institutions have been signing off on releasing it under an open source license; while there’s been progress recently, GoGetter is not yet free. In the meantime, nobody has been able to play with it, improve it, or make it compatible with Firefox 3.

Lesson of the day: if you want to start an open source project, particularly if multiple institutions will be involved in writing it, it’s a good idea to make sure from the beginning that all parties are willing to release their work under an open source license.

There is a growing collection of “RFC”s for 3.2 features on the koha wiki. These are potential features that may be added in 3.2 or later. They’re put there to try to elicit community discussion to help steer them to make the best possible product. The 3.2 release manager, Galen, has indicated an interest in having these RFCs looked over by the end of next week, so I thought I’d take you on a quick tour of some of the more interesting ones. Here’s a quick look at some of the types of things being considered:

Administration improvements: The system of maintaining and using system preferences may get expanded by using roles and making the permissions collection more granular. On a somewhat related topic, there may be some work put into making independent branches work a little bit better.

Improvements to the user interface: In order to make Koha look and feel better to users, it’s possible we’ll extend the amount of AJAX elements that we use.

There are a handful of potential improvements for circulation. Among these is adding the concept of hourly circulation policies for some items. There are also a few that touch on holds, recalls, and fines.

Another interesting one would introduce summary holdings for grouping related items.

These are just a few of the RFCs that will get considered for features for 3.2 and beyond. You can help make Koha better by weighing in on how these may work together best.