by The Evergreen Outreach Committee is pleased to announce that July’s Community Spotlight is Linda Jansová. Linda is an information specialist for the Librarianship Institute, which is a part of the National Library of the Czech Republic. Linda is also the founder and current vice president of the nonprofit Osvobozená knihovna, z. s., which is an Evergreen service provider for Czech libraries.
Linda and her husband Václav Jansa have been involved with Evergreen since all the way back in 2008. She was the initial coordinator of translations of Evergreen strings into Czech. According to Launchpad, the Czech translation has the highest rate of completion of any of the translation projects – a mere 70 strings out of over 18,000 are all that remain untranslated. Linda has also participated in several Bug Squashing Weeks, testing patches and commenting on bugs.
Thanks to her community work with Evergreen, Linda has helped organize an annual seminar in Prague for library information technology with a focus on free software. Linda learned how to use DokuWiki from contributing to the Evergreen DokuWiki, and together with Eva Cerni?áková, leveraged that experience to create and maintain a set of library automation tips for Czech librarians.
While Linda has not been able to attend an in-person Evergreen event in North America, she was happy to participate in this year’s Online Conference. “I felt we could fully participate alongside all the community members from the US and Canada who usually attend the conference in person,” she says.
Linda finds it very rewarding to be involved with the Evergreen community. “You can help shape the product,” she tells us. “You can meet like-minded people and compare the way you handle various processes in your libraries.”
She cites the diversity of experience among Evergreen community members as one of the community’s strengths. “You do not have to be a developer to become a community member, [which] may be easy to overlook, especially for those who have not been involved in any free software project yet,” Linda reminds us. “There are many ways in which one can make a useful contribution – from translations to reporting and solving bugs or sharing experience via the community mailing lists.”
Linda leaves us with a final piece of wisdom: “Making a contribution to a free software project – be it a piece of code or a piece of user experience shared via the mailing list – is something that lasts.”
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Any questions can be directed to Andrea Buntz Neiman via abneiman@equinoxinitiative.org or abneiman in IRC.