Get Involved

Contributing to Koha is easy, you don't need to be a programmer. Anyone who is interested can help out.

• Do you have ideas for neat features to be included?
• Do you have some financial resources that you could contribute?
• Can you translate Koha into your native language?

Here are some ways you can get involved:

Join the development team

If you are a Perl programmer (or want to learn) and/or have some experience with libraries (or want to learn), we'd love to have you join the programming effort. In any event, if you'd like to participate in improving Koha, please join the koha-devel mailing list. You can sign up at our Koha Mailing Lists page.

Install Koha

Sometimes you need to state the obvious. Installing Koha, or convincing your local library to install it is the most awesome contribution you could make. If you can't install it yourself, you can try out LibLime's Koha demos. Go ahead and use these demos to the full, add borrowers, check out books to them, add items, do your worst! and then let us know what you'd like improved. Alternatively, you can sample Koha out in the wild, check out the Showcase section of this Website.

Sponsor a project

Koha is free, but most Koha developers make a living supporting it. The more customers Koha developers can find, the less they need to find other jobs to make ends meet. So if you've got any monetary resources that you can devote to Koha, please consider it.

If you would like to see the plans for Koha 3.2, check out the Release Manager's 3.2 Roadmap.

How to get the ball rolling? You could write a private message to one of the developers, naming the project you would like to 'sponsor' and the amount of funds you can devote to it. You could develop an RFP (Request for Proposal) if your idea is large (NCIP for example), and then notify the koha-devel list.

Check the Koha Support page for a list of folks who can support Koha.

Help with documentation

We need more, and better documentation for library decision makers, programmers and developers and librarians. We would also like to have available tutorials and materials suitable to put in a library for first time OPAC (or even computer) users. If you've figured out how to do something with Koha, or have just "learnt" it yourself, please consider writing a short piece about it and contributing it to the Documentation section of this Website.

Test things and report bugs

Please do this! We want Koha to be the most stable, easy-to-use system out there. Report bugs via the Koha Bugzilla. If you're just getting your feet wet, learn more about how to contribute to Bugzilla.

Suggest improvements

Even if you can't program or sponsor a new feature, we'd love to hear about it, join the mailing lists and drop us a line.

Translate Koha

If you're willing to devote time translating Koha into your language please do! We're going to need help translating the website as well as the Koha interfaces and documentation into as many languages as possible. Join the koha-devel and koha-translate lists and introduce yourself as a translator.

Teach us about library standards and processes

If you can help us understand something (or why something is important) we're more likely to do a good job of getting it into Koha.

Invite us to speak

If you're organizing a conference or forum we would welcome the opportunity to speak about Koha, open source, or what it's like working with people all over the world. While we're not necessarily going to be able to accept every offer, Koha contributors are spread widely, and some travel widely too. If you can contribute to the air fares then that's great as well. We're also happy to speak on the radio, although we might be a bit shy for TV.

Spread the word

Write a piece about Koha and submit it to a magazine or website to help get the word out.

Come on in, the water's fine.