by The Evergreen Outreach Committee is pleased to announce that January’s Contributor of the Month is Chris Sharp, who is the PINES System Administrator at the Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS).
Chris is one of the earliest members of the Evergreen community — hired in 2008 by GPLS, he represents the first generation of system administrators who were running Evergreen outside of the original development team. Chris has served on the Evergreen Oversight Board, most of the Conference Planning Committees, and in 2018 was added to the Evergreen Core Committers group. He founded and continues to lead the Evergreen SysAdmin Interest Group, and also administers the community mailing lists & archives.
Even before joining the Core Committers, Chris was very active in Launchpad and has contributed many commits over the years. As of press time he has filed 151 bugs in Launchpad, commented upon 304 bugs, authored 103 commits to Evergreen, and pushed 33 commits of others’ work. He has also contributed 13 commits to OpenSRF.
Chris worked as a reference librarian before his interest in Evergreen led him to GPLS. “[I went] from a curious and skilled but mostly non-technical role to becoming a developer. So I know it’s possible and when I see people with the curiosity and the drive I want to encourage them to try things…. [and] getting involved is easier if you have someone to encourage you.”
“That’s the energy that keeps us running — the curiosity to open it up and see how it works. That fear of looking dumb keeps people from doing their best work and I would encourage them to be bold,” he says.
Chris can often be found putting this philosophy into practice, helping others troubleshoot their Evergreen systems and answering questions in the #evergreen IRC channel. Chris has encouraged other Georgia Evergreen users to become more involved in the community, saying, “I try to keep our agency and our libraries focused on the fact that this is a community project, and not just something for us. Our libraries understand that we’re a player and we need to stay that way — it benefits us and the community at large.”
Chris concludes by telling us, “I think becoming fearless about putting yourself out there would be my main takeaway — that’s what I’ve done and that’s what I want everyone else to do.”
—
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.