Evergreen Community

The Evergreen Outreach Committee is pleased to announce that May’s Community Spotlight is Tiffany Little, of Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS). Tiffany is the PINES Services Specialist for Acquisitions, and in that role has become very involved with the larger Evergreen community.

Tiffany’s first experiences with Evergreen were while she was working as a PINES librarian. Her background is primarily cataloging but her experience also covered circulation, administration, and tech: “Pretty much everything except children’s services!” Tiffany notes. “Because I had such a broad range of experience, I like to see everything in the community.”  

Tiffany’s community involvement began in 2017 when she was hired by PINES to facilitate broader use of Acquisitions in the consortium. She almost immediately was asked to join the Evergreen Community Development Initiative (then MassLNC) Development Committee as a workflow specialist.

In the years since, Tiffany’s community involvement has grown significantly. She revived the community Acquisitions Interest Group, and currently serves as its coordinator. She also was on the Conference Committee for the 2020 Evergreen International Conference and is a current member of The Evergreen Project Board.

In addition, Tiffany is a regular participant in community Bug Squashing Weeks, and is a member of the Bug Wranglers Team. Tiffany has commented on 443 bugs in Launchpad, as well as filed 49 bugs, and has contributed two patches to the Evergreen codebase.

Tiffany’s coding knowledge is primarily self taught, and she describes a path that is accessible to many who may not think of themselves as coders. Back in her library days, she began creating formulas for spreadsheets – and then when formulas got too complicated, she taught herself VBA to automate even more spreadsheet functions. “VBA taught me the idea of what coding is – input, do a thing in a certain order, output,” Tiffany says. “So when I wanted to do a patch, I did a similar thing – I looked in the file until I found something that looked like it was what I wanted, and tinkered until it worked.” 

Tiffany’s advice to new community members is to lurk, especially if you’re intimidated at first. “When you start to lurk in the listserv and IRC, you realize that it’s just a roomful of people – and not that many people – and they become less intimidating.” As you get to know community members, she says, you learn to associate IRC handles with real people and build those relationships – however, make sure you are making connections: “Don’t lurk forever!”

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Do you know someone in the community who deserves a bit of extra recognition? Please use this form to submit your nominations. We ask for your email in case we have any questions, but all nominations will be kept confidential.

Any questions can be directed to Andrea Buntz Neiman via abneiman@equinoxinitiative.org or abneiman in IRC.

The Evergreen Outreach Committee is pleased to announce that April’s Community Spotlight goes to Ben Shum, a longstanding community member and Core Committer for both Evergreen and OpenSRF.

Ben’s involvement with Evergreen dates back to 2009, when he attended the first Evergreen conference in Athens, Georgia. Over the years Ben has worked for a couple of Evergreen service providers, and while he no longer works in the library field he continues to be an active contributor to Evergreen. “I’ve made it my business to keep nosing around,” Ben tells us.

“My approach to using technology is that I want to make sure people have the right tools and the ability to use those tools to get their work done,” he says. Ben’s background is more closely related to systems than development, and he is often at the forefront of testing Evergreen’s compatibility with new operating systems and Postgres database versions. 

Ben also spends a lot of time reviewing code submitted by other community members. Between OpenSRF and Evergreen he has logged nearly 1100 commits of others’ work, in addition to authoring close to 400 patches on his own.

Another area that Ben has worked on extensively is improving the translation infrastructure in Evergreen. “Several years ago we did Google Summer of Code and I was invited to the mentor summit,” Ben says. “One session that really spoke to me was about translation – they talked about how to make our programming easier to translate, which would improve adoption and accessibility to non-English speakers.”

Ben enjoys attending events like the Hack-a-Way and Conference to have dedicated time and space to think about and work on Evergreen. “I’ve always enjoyed meeting new contributors and getting to know other people and other peoples’ work,” he says.

Ben encourages new community members to find an area of interest and use that as a springboard for community involvement. He recounts how he, too, was nervous about getting involved with the community at first – but his boss advised him to say something in IRC every day, “Even if it’s just hi.”

“It’s hard to get over that initial trepidation of dipping your toe into communication but you have to put yourself out there,” Ben says. “We don’t bite … much. Find something you’re passionate about, and get involved with that.”

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Do you know someone in the community who deserves a bit of extra recognition? Please use this form to submit your nominations. We ask for your email in case we have any questions, but all nominations will be kept confidential.

Any questions can be directed to Andrea Buntz Neiman via abneiman@equinoxinitiative.org or abneiman in IRC.

The Evergreen Outreach Committee is pleased to announce that March’s Community Spotlight is Terran McCanna of the Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS). Terran is the PINES Program Manager at GPLS.

Terran has been involved with the Evergreen community since 2013. In that time she has been very involved with bug squashing – whether reporting, testing, or patching, Terran has tackled almost every aspect of bug management in Evergreen. For many years she has served as the Coordinator for the community Bug Squashing Week, where she organizes sandbox servers and tracks all bug activity.

Bug Squashing Week was a mere Bug Squashing Day until 2017, and Terran was instrumental in making the larger event happen. “I’m proud of my work in encouraging and enabling more community members to participate in testing through the expansion of Bug Squashing events,” she says.

Terran’s work with bug squashing has generated some impressive Launchpad and git statistics. She is responsible for 218 reported bugs (along with a total of 808 bugs she’s commented on), and has authored 30 patches accepted into Evergreen and signed off on 83 more. 

In addition to working with bugs, Terran also helped found the recently-created New Developers Working Group, which gives new developers a forum to exchange ideas and help each other learn.  Terran was also the local chair of this year’s Evergreen Conference (sadly cancelled), in addition to being a member of the standing Conference Committee for many years.

Prior to joining the PINES team, Terran worked at a PINES member library in several front-line roles. At PINES, she handles tasks such as training, policy discussion, documentation, and helpdesk support. “I have to take both a larger state-wide view of how our consortium works, as well as taking a deeper look at how the software works,” Terran tells us. “I feel that this has made me a strong advocate for making the software more user-friendly, and for improvements to the software that will provide benefit to both patrons and library staff.”

Terran recommends that new community members get involved by joining a community working group, contributing to documentation, or participating in testing.

“It’s been incredibly rewarding and exciting to be a part of the Evergreen community as the software has evolved from the desktop client to the web client, and how it continues to evolve to meet library needs. I look forward to participating in many more developments in whatever way I can.”

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Do you know someone in the community who deserves a bit of extra recognition? Please use this form to submit your nominations. We ask for your email in case we have any questions, but all nominations will be kept confidential.

Any questions can be directed to Andrea Buntz Neiman via abneiman@equinoxinitiative.org or abneiman in IRC.