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.

The Evergreen Outreach Committee is pleased to announce that February’s Community Spotlight goes to Steve Callender, the Support Manager for Equinox Open Library Initiative. Steve oversees the Support Team at Equinox and works with a wide variety of Evergreen libraries and library staff across the United States and Canada.

In his role as Support Manager, Steve is very familiar with not only the most popular features of Evergreen but also some of its issues and pain points. Because of this, Steve has been active in reporting bugs to Launchpad as well as authoring several commits for the Evergreen codebase.

“Having direct access to both end users and developers allows me to bridge the gap between the groups when either documenting a bug or just explaining to someone how it’s designed to work,” Steve says. His patches often come out of direct conversations with end users or issues that he encounters while doing his own work in Support.

One of Steve’s earliest patches – and one that stands out in his mind – was adding a way to update Org Unit proximity automatically when an Org Unit is changed. Previously, this required using a separate parameter with autogen, and Steve’s patch made it part of the regular autogen process. “The patch was very minor, and a bit self serving,” Steve admits, “But it was definitely a catalyst for me to continue to try to help streamline processes and occasionally just find a better way at doing something.”

Steve has been a part of the Evergreen community for 11 years and spreads his enthusiasm for it often. “I love explaining to new folks about the community and then watching them become involved,” he says. Steve points out that some of Evergreen’s most popular features started out as wishlist items in the community. “It’s a great way to … find partners that may be interested in bringing those new ideas to life with you.”

Steve notes that the Evergreen community is not just for developers – it also includes end users, who can talk to other end users about how they use the software; and new coders, who can learn the ropes of Evergreen code and patch creation.

“I’ve witnessed other communities that make it really difficult for folks,” Steve tells us. “[They make] someone feel embarrassed or afraid to ask a question, and it’s such a breath of fresh air to see that Evergreen has none of that toxicity. It’s just a wonderful community.”

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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.