Ian, So here is the response I sent to MJ off-list:
“I don't have time to dig out an irc client, but I do regularly read the logs at http://stats.workbuffer.org/irclog/koha/ I didn't say that open source support is an edge case. Of course it isn't, and I as much as anyone appreciate the enormous impact of open source in the library automation space. What I said is that having multiple support contracts is rare. If you could provide evidence to the contrary I would definitely be interested.” This year’s survey does, in fact, track the support company separate from the support vendor: [cid:[email protected]] The initial value is supplied through a table look-up, but responders can adjust the venders if needed. This approach accommodates for the common situation where many different firms provide support services for the same software. What it doesn’t do is account for a given library working with multiple support vendors, which I believe is the rare case. -marshall From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ian Walls Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 3:10 PM To: Marshall Breeding Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] ILS Perceptions survey (Marshall Breeding) Marshall, It's not so much an 'edge-case' as a generalization. Product and Company are two separate things to track with an N to M relationship. Any given company can support multiple products (as has been true for many years) and a product can be supported by multiple companies (this tends to only be true of open source products, but not necessarily; a company could have a license with another to support their proprietary system). I'd be happy to help make the necessary structural changes to the system to support this generalization; I know time is tight, and it's probably more important to me right now than you. But given the trends in open source ILS systems (more people adopting, very few leaving), this is only going to become more and more common as time goes by. Cheers, -Ian On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Marshall Breeding <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: MJ, The survey needs to cover the automation scenarios in place in most libraries. Within any given niche, there may be some quirks, but almost all ILS implementations contract for support only from a single organization. In rare cases, there may be additional contracts to other vendors for development tasks, but the question focuses on support. I don't want to design the survey around edge cases that rarely occur. In this year's survey, I've added an additional factor for libraries to indicate whether they receive support directly from their "ILS vendor" or through an intermediary such as through another library or consortium. This gives me a way to analyze the results in a way that accommodates the situation in many consortia where the first-line support happens locally with only unresolved issues being directed to the contracted support organization. Libraries responding to the survey can always provide additional information in the comments field to explain any special circumstances, and often they do. I publish summaries of the survey responses in a way that protects the confidentiality of the responders. I do not plan to release the data beyond that. While it may be possible to scrub and normalize the data in a way that it could be shared publicly, it would take more effort beyond what I already put in to the survey. You are the only one that I recall that has asked for this in the five years that I have been running this survey. Best regards, -marshall Marshall Breeding Editor, Library Technology Guides http://www.librarytechnology.org [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://twitter.com/mbreeding -----Original Message----- From: MJ Ray [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 1:15 PM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Cc: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] ILS Perceptions survey (Marshall Breeding) "Marshall Breeding" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> > I do hope that all libraries using Koha will respond to the survey. > The survey forms are linked to each library's entry in the > lib-web-cats directory, so you will need to submit an entry if your > library is not already represented. A large number of libraries using > Koha are already represented, but I'm sure that there are many still missing. See: Hi Marshall. Usual requests. Please could you decouple the outdated one-to-one relationship between LMSes and support companies? And would you release (some subset of) the data as Open Access, Free and Open Source Software in a nice ready-to-analyse format this year? It would be great to see an Open survey which reflected the reality of the new LMS support landscape. Maybe one of the above in 2011, one in 2012? Thanks, -- MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop<http://www.software.coop>, a for-more-than-profit co-op. Webmaster, Debian Developer, Past Koha RM, statistician, former lecturer. In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Available for hire for various work through http://www.software.coop/ _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel website : http://www.koha-community.org/ git : http://git.koha-community.org/ bugs : http://bugs.koha-community.org/ -- Ian Walls Lead Development Specialist ByWater Solutions Phone # (888) 900-8944 http://bywatersolutions.com [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Twitter: @sekjal
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