Rogan Hamby

With apologies for the belated posting, the Evergreen Outreach Committee is pleased to announce that October’s Community Spotlight is our very own Outreach Committee Chair, Rogan Hamby. In his professional life, Rogan is currently the Project and Data Analyst at Equinox Open Library Initiative, where he does a little bit of everything. “One person once described a good part of my job as punching MARC records into shape,” he says. “There is some truth to that.”

Rogan has been working with the Evergreen community in one form or another since 2009 and his contributions to the community are extensive. Starting in 2012, he helped organize the first community Hack-a-way, and has had a role organizing that event ever since. The 2020 Hack-a-way is this week and is being hosted online. Rogan also previously served as an Evergreen Board Member, and has chaired the Outreach Committee since 2018. His community work has also included writing patches, testing and reviewing patches, and presenting at several Evergreen Conferences.

Rogan’s earliest Evergreen work arose out of his role as a public library employee with SCLENDS, an early Evergreen consortium. Rogan worked for different public libraries as well as the State Library which gave him a unique perspective on Evergreen. “I saw the challenges of how libraries at different sizes work within a consortium and the wider Evergreen community,” he tells us. “That has really informed how I look at community interactions.”

He has presented several “SQL in Evergreen” workshops, and these have shown to be very popular with the community. “I’ve had a lot of people say [the workshops] really helped them understand Evergreen reporting better and that they’ve kept notes they refer back to regularly,” Rogan says. “That’s been really nice.  No one should underestimate how nice it is to hear that someone found what you did useful.” Rogan’s Evergreen SQL wisdom is gathered on his Emerald Elephant blog.

When he’s not devoting his considerable talents to the Evergreen community, Rogan also enjoys reading, tabletop gaming, baking, and woodworking, and has recently started to learn guitar and still life drawing – both of which he claims to be bad at, but is enjoying learning. There’s a metaphor for community involvement: don’t fear your lack of knowledge – enjoy incrementally building that knowledge. 

Specifically, Rogan advises checking out a community working group. “All of our meetings are public so you’re welcome to lurk to see if it feels like a good fit for you. Do jump in though, people aren’t going to press-gang you so if you want to get involved you have to take initiative,” he says. “Our community is pretty amazing and I’m proud to be a part of it.”

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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.