How to get involved in the open source community
Last updated on: 19th June 2025| 19th June 2025 | Open Fifth | Community
Introduction
On 19 June 2025 we held the webinar ‘How to get involved in the open source community?’, led by Fiona Borthwick (Head of Sales and Account Management – Open Fifth)
The webinar was presented live on Zoom for registered attendees. A recording was made of the session, with the Q&A section held outside of the recording to allow for openness in discussion and privacy of attendees.
What is open source?
- Open code – non-proprietary
- No license restrictions
- Free from vendor lock-in
- Worldwide contributions
See our ‘What is open source?’ post and recording for more information.
UK Government Guidance
The Digital, Data and Technology Playbook, updated June 2023, states that:
- There is an expectation that government software and code is open-source by default.
- By allowing equal access to government IT contracts for open source and proprietary software providers, we will create a level playing field, drive competition and incentivise suppliers to co-operate and innovate.
The Technology Code of Practice, updated February 2025, states:
- Be open and use open source
Publish your code and use open source software to improve transparency, flexibility and accountability.
Read more about TCoP point 3 – Be open and use open source.
Working with Open Fifth
- Hosting and support
- We look after you – there is no need for you to host the server and do the technical things
- Our contributions to documentation, development, etc.
- You can get as involved or not as you want
- Developments are driven by our customer base
Getting Involved in the Open Source Community
There are plenty of roles and extents to which you can choose to get involved in the open source community:
- Development – anyone can contribute! Sign off or develop…
- Koha development sandboxes
- Koha translation – use of Weblate
- Documentation – online help manual
- Koha Community Newsletter – monthly
- General discussions
- Nothing!
Specific Roles: Koha
- Bug wranglers
Always needed! Help to keep Bugzilla tidy – manage the list, identify duplicates, promote bugs to specialists and find people to do the sign offs and testing
Everyone is invited to this. It is a great first-time role and makes a big difference in the community
- Documentation team
- Wiki curators
- Accessibility advocate
- Quality assurance (QA)
- Release maintainer
- Release manager
Platforms
- Mattermost – Find out more about Mattermost and how to use it in our ‘Using Mattermost‘ post.
- Koha mailing lists
- Koha-US Specialist Interest Groups (SIGS)
- Bugzilla– See our video ‘Testing bugs in the Koha community‘
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- Jira – See our video ‘Aspen Discovery and Jira‘.
The Koha Project Dashboard gives a great overview of what the development community are working on, bug fixes, releases and activity.
Conferences and Events
KohaCon
-
- Annual international conferences
- 2024 – Montreal, Canada
- 2025 – 17 – 23 November, Wellington, New Zealand. Register to attend (online or in-person) and find out more on the KohaCon website.
AspenCon
- March 2024 – inaugural conference – Denver, USA
- October 2025 – Nashville, USA. Register to attend (online or in-person) and find out more on the AspenCon website.
Koha Hackfest
- Annually, around March
- Read our summary of the 2025 event.
User Groups
UK-based
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- North West User Group
- Health Libraries User Group
- Koha Academic Network – LinkedIn Group
International
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- Koha-US
- Swedish Koha User Group
- KohaLa
- Aspen Community Gathering
- And plenty more!
Open Fifth Events
Check out our Events page to see what we have coming up.
Open Discussions – quarterly
- Customer-only events.
- March – “Demonstrating impact”
- June – “Tracking engagement with your library software”
- The next Open Discussion will be 16 September 2025 on the topic of “AI, LLMs and Your Library System’.
Annual Customer Day
- Customer-only events.
- Mixture of presentations and workshop-style sessions delivered by both Open Fifth staff, customers and invited speakers
Shared practice forums
- Non-customer events.
- Open Source Software Shared Practice and Experience Forum
- 7 August 2025, London – Registration open.
