Thank you for accepting the Tuit Challenge

It’s been two weeks since the 2023 Evergreen International Conference, and I am just getting around to posting the final tuit fact that was supposed to be posted shortly before the conference.

In the weeks leading up to the conference, my attention was suddenly diverted by two major family life decisions, making it difficult to also bake cookies, practice karaoke, prepare a keynote presentation, and write a blog post in time for the conference. Concerned that I may burn out while preparing a presentation on burnout, I engaged in a quick purposeful abandonment exercise and decided I could delay the writing of my final blog post until I had more time to focus on it.

Some News

Before I dive in, let me share my news about the two family life decisions. On a personal note, after a hastily-scheduled trip to the West coast a week before the conference, my 18-year-old daughter selected Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington for the next step in her educational journey. Although I will miss her dearly when she travels across the country, I am so proud of the woman she has become and am excited to see what she will accomplish in the next four years.

In other news, I will soon move on to a new professional opportunity. As of July 3, I will be the new Executive Director of the North of Boston Library Exchange (NOBLE). I worked with NOBLE during the nine years I served as Project Coordinator for the former Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative (MassLNC), and I am thrilled to work with their libraries again to deliver innovative and critical services to their communities. At the same time, it is very difficult to leave my colleagues at the SAILS library network. I have been fortunate to work with a fantastic group of librarians at SAILS, and I am very grateful for the support they have given me over the past four years.

As it turns out, my final fun tuit fact is directly related to my new network.

Fun fact about tuits #4
Every workday, I drink my coffee from a round tuit mug that my NOBLE colleagues gave as a goodbye gift when I left MassLNC in 2018.

I received many tokens of appreciation while I worked at MassLNC: flowers and cake in celebration of turning out the 2.12 release; a card signed by the entire Evergreen community; and the gifts I received upon leaving the project. Gifts are one way people recognize a job well done. Recognizing people for their contributions creates a positive work environment and increases job satisfaction. In fact, rewarding employees for doing a good job is one of the six components of workplace culture that helps reduce burnout.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, I made many commitments to myself to better maintain and reestablish relationships with friends and loved ones. I promised that I would more consistently show appreciation for what people have done for me and let them know what I admire about them. Although you can show appreciation with gifts or a quick thank you, I believe the best way to show your gratitude is to write a thoughtful note telling somebody how you feel.

In this vein, I will use the rest of this blog post to write a note to each person who accepted my tuit challenge and let them know what I appreciate about them and/or their work. Many are people I have worked with closely over the years. Others are people I just met two weeks ago, and, in one case, I haven’t had an opportunity to meet the person who accepted my challenge. But, through their contributions to the Evergreen community, there is something I appreciate from everyone who accepted the challenge.

They are listed in the order in which they accepted the challenge.

In Gratitude and Appreciation

Andrea Buntz Neiman

I was not surprised when Andrea stepped up and accepted the tuit challenge so quickly given that she has often joined Rogan in his strong encouragement that I perform karaoke. In accepting the challenge, she also immediately offered to “stand up in karaoke solidarity” with me, demonstrating the same willingness I have often seen from her to help out a fellow community member when they are in a pinch. I first met Andrea when she was a technical services librarian at the Kent County Public Library (MD) when I talked to her about the possibility of working together on a connector for an aging version of Ursa that Massachusetts was still using at the time our consortia migrated to Evergreen. Although we weren’t able to work together on that project, we had plenty of opportunity to work closely together once she was hired by Equinox as their Project Manager for Software Development. I worked with many project managers during my years in the Evergreen community, and she was one of the more responsive ones, always showing a thorough knowledge of the software and her project details. In order to be an effective project manager, you need to be one of those bridges that I described in my first Fun Facts about Tuits post, and Andrea plays that role well. 

Andrea is also a great team player in the community. Since my early years in the community, she has been a consistent presenter at conferences, sharing her knowledge with the rest of the community. She commits Equinox’s documentation to the community repo, participates on the Outreach Committee, and was heavily involved in the planning of the virtual conferences of the past three years. She shares my hatred of the Yankees; I just wish she would show more love for my beloved Red Sox.

 Thank you, Andrea, for all you do in support of the community and for keeping it fun!

Jason Stephenson

As somebody who has worked for not just one but two of the original MassLNC partners, Jason is somebody with whom I worked closely during my MassLNC years.  When we held our first MassLNC Open Source Project meeting on my third day on the job, Jason was the person who told everyone we should join the #evergreen IRC channel, and I immediately took his advice (after doing a little Googling on what IRC was.) While he was busy getting his own consortium ready for a migration to Evergreen, he also devoted a significant amount of time supporting a test system for MassLNC and loading development branches so that the group could test their enhancements against production data. 

Jason served as Evergreen’s first official Bug Wrangler, has been a core committer since 2012, was the 2.9 Release Manager, and has helped out with other releases. All of these titles aside, what I consider his most valuable contribution to the project is his support of new contributors. He’s always available in IRC to answer questions from new and experienced contributors alike, and, in my years on the project, I’ve seen him go out of his way to review first-time code contributions. That first contribution is key to engaging new developers in an open-source project. It takes a lot of courage for most people to make their first contribution, and if it sits around without any review from a more experienced developer, the new contributor may give up on the project. Having people available to review those contributions is essential to growing a community of contributors. 

Thank you, Jason, for your willingness to help people out with their system and code questions and for being kind to newbies.

Terran McCanna

As Georgia PINES Program Manager, Terran has been highly involved in activities that help grow new contributors in the community. Terran is the longtime organizer of Evergreen Bug Squashing events, taking over the event in June 2016. When community members cited the need for a New Developer Interest Group at the 2019 Evergreen conference, Terran stepped up to lead the group, providing a venue for new Evergreen developers to work with each other to learn Evergreen code conventions. I have worked alongside Terran on many joint development projects and can say she is a great software tester and an advocate for innovative enhancements that help advance the Evergreen software and for improved UI. Terran also served on the Evergreen Oversight Board from 2016-19. 

Thank you, Terran, for all of your work to get new contributors engaged in the project.

Ruth Frasur

Ruth has always brought a bundle of energy and enthusiasm to the Evergreen project. In her early years on the project, Ruth demonstrated that a director from a library that is part of a large consortium can make a significant impact on Evergreen. Back in 2013, as director of the Hagerstown Jefferson Township Library, she rallied a large group of Evergreen Indiana libraries to contribute to MassLNC’s Enhanced Formats project (aka the icon project). The combined contributions of those libraries helped push the project over the line for final funding. She was always willing to provide constructive feedback on the software and to talk to newcomers about how to get the most out of the Evergreen community. She left the community for a few short years, but then returned to Evergreen Indiana to, among other things, lead the Evergreen Community Development Initiative (ECDI). I was thrilled when I learned that somebody as engaged as Ruth is in community activities had taken over the Initiative that got its start at MassLNC.

Thank you Ruth for your continued support of Evergreen, for being such a welcoming person to newcomers, and for generating enthusiasm in the project. Additional conference-related props go to Ruth for 1) wearing an awesome t-shirt and 2) unhesitatingly encouraging me to “keep going” when I realized I had already hit the 45-minute point of a presentation that ultimately ran 25 minutes too long.

Rogan Hamby

Rogan was my partner in crime during many of the years I worked on the Evergreen project. I barely knew him when we were both elected to the Evergreen Oversight Board in 2012, but I soon discovered we shared similar values. We both believed the Board should support community groups as they devised  their own practices and procedures rather than attempt to mandate those procedures. As active Board members, we also often volunteered to work on similar projects, and we both strongly advocated for project transparency. When I raised the idea of creating a committee to publicize Evergreen to the larger library community, Rogan was the first person to step up to join what was to become the Outreach Committee. He was also the obvious choice to step into the role of chair when I stepped down from the committee. Whenever I came up with some new idea to promote the project, whether it was the annual community report or a series of videos to promote the big 3.0 release, he was by my side. While I was frantically working during the President’s Day holiday in 2017 to get the 2.12 beta release out, he worked with Ben Shum and me to get new Concerto test records added to the database without breaking our automated tests. Rogan is the person who makes our annual community report look fabulous and is also the person who organizes the annual developer hack-a-way. This event is critical to keeping developers engaged throughout the year, allowing them to talk about big-picture development issues and to also focus on coding for several consecutive days. Rogan has also served as an incident responder ever since the Evergreen Code of Conduct was adopted.

Of course, Rogan was also the person who first raised the idea of singing conference karaoke. Although I feigned dread at the idea of him picking my song, I always knew he wouldn’t make me sing anything too terrible or modern. And he didn’t hesitate to join me on stage even though I know public singing isn’t his favorite thing to do.

Thank you, Rogan, for your consistent advocacy for the Evergreen project. 

Stephanie Leary

Having seen Stephanie’s code commits over the past many months, I was excited to have the opportunity to meet her at the 2023 Evergreen conference. As Equinox’s new Front End Developer, she already has 28 code commits merged into the core software since last September. She has focused on improving accessibility in Evergreen and other open-source software supported by Equinox. Any software project becomes better when there is at least one person on hand who focuses on accessibility, and this type of position has been long overdue in the Evergreen community.

However, Stephanie has not just been working on code. She quickly jumped into the community, becoming active in the New Developers Interest Group and the Outreach Committee. I am especially excited about her latest endeavor, starting an Evergreen User Interface User Group. In my opinion, Evergreen’s functionality has met or exceeded that of any ILS I’ve seen, but we’ve always struggled with a consistent UI across interfaces. I’m looking forward to seeing what will happen now that a group dedicated UI is in place. 

Thank you, Stephanie, for bringing a new perspective and energy to the project and for jumping in without hesitation.

Debbie Luchenbill

Debbie has been the facilitator for the Documentation Interest Group (DIG) since 2019. DIG facilitator is a critical role that requires a great deal of cat herding to ensure documentation keeps up with all of the new features added to Evergreen in each major release. Debbie has also been a great advocate for the software, helping out at the Evergreen booth during the 2015 ALA Annual Conference and participating in other ALA sessions highlighting the benefits of using Evergreen. She was the co-chair of the 2018 Evergreen International Conference, has served on the Project Board, and is a member of the Outreach Committee. She has even taken the time to mail me some Evergreen merchandise stored at the MOBIUS office when I was missing the community and in need of a swag purchase. She is also somebody I can count on to play a hand of cribbage when I remember to bring my cribbage board to the conference.

Thank you, Debbie, for consistently answering the call for help with outreach efforts and for herding the documentation cats.

Scott Angel

Scott is the only person accepting the tuit challenge who I haven’t had an opportunity to meet yet. I don’t know how I missed you at the conference, Scott, but I hope to meet you at the next in-person Evergreen event! Scott is the full stack developer at MOBIUS and is just starting to contribute code to the project. My favorite is a nifty new feature that will allow staff users and patrons to view their password when logging into Evergreen. Although I haven’t met Scott, by keeping tabs on Evergreen developer meetings, I saw how he recently spoke up for the need for new developer documentation. New contributors are the best people to get involved in documentation and web site efforts because they can clearly see the holes to which the veterans have become accustomed. However, I’ve found that by the time people feel comfortable speaking up or participating, they’ve already started to find their way around the documentation. I admire Scott for speaking up early on to communicate where he needed help, leading to more discussions on this topic with the new developer interest group.

Thank you, Scott, for contributing code, working well with the feedback provided by other developers, and starting to get involved in the developer community.

Blake Graham-Henderson

Blake was still fairly new to the community when he stepped up in 2014 to set up MOBIUS Sandboxes for the first-ever Bug Squashing Day. Fun fact: Blake’s first Evergreen patch was merged into the core software on that very same day. Not only does he continue to maintain these Sandboxes for what has become Bug Squashing Weeks, he also keeps them going throughout the year as community demo servers. Blake was my buildmaster during the year I served as 2.12 Release Maintainer and wrote the code for one of my favorite MassLNC development projects, the ability to jump to other formats and editions of a title from the bib record. 

Aside from all of his work in the Evergreen community, he will always be known as the person to introduce The Resistance, Hanabi, and other fun games to Evergreeners. Until I met Blake, I had never played a card game at a restaurant table while waiting for my order to be served, but it became commonplace at Evergreen conferences and hack-a-ways. The late-night gaming that started under Blake helped build camaraderie among Evergreen community members and gave us one more thing to look forward to when gathering together at in-person events. 

Thank you, Blake, for so often coming to my aid, even when I was clearly the spy.

Galen Charlton

A new contributor does not need to be in the Evergreen community for long to understand how much Galen does to support the project. One just needs to look at the Evergreen and OpenSRF git repos to see the high frequency with which his name appears as both author and committer or view the project wiki to see the number of releases for which he served as Release Manager or as a Release Team member and his frequent involvement in Evergreen governance. It is obvious Galen is a primary leader in this community.

However, I’m going to focus on some attributes that aren’t clearly evident by reading through project resources and statistics. Galen is one of those people who actively works to lift up the people around him. I’ve seen him do so with other Evergreen community members, with library colleagues outside of the Evergreen community, and with me. I became a better participant in the Evergreen community through Galen’s encouragement, support, and general advocacy for making the community a welcoming place. 

As I was starting to find my voice through my participation in the Evergreen project, mostly through necessity as I advocated on behalf of my member consortia, I found myself gaining confidence as I recognized that my voice was valued in the community. This recognition came through the response I received from many community members, not just from Galen, but Galen was particularly proactive in communicating that my voice was welcome. When I attended a conference developer meeting for the first time, feeling totally out of place among the other developers, Galen specifically checked in with me to see if I had an opinion on a discussion topic. He included me in blog posts when he acknowledged women working in technology and open source, reassuring me that I was working in a positive direction. I also know he would quietly (or not so quietly) speak to people if they were engaging in behavior or advocating policy that might turn people away from the community.

On a community level, he wrote the original Evergreen Code of Conduct and shared the AdaCamp Photography/Audio/Video Policy with me, which was my inspiration for advocating for a similar policy in the Evergreen community. Both of these policies establish an environment where all people should feel welcome and that their wishes are respected. Galen is often the first person I contact when I have questions or need feedback on issues facing the community. I value his judgment and his commitment to making the Evergreen community a safe place for contributors. I also am deeply appreciative of his willingness to serve as buildmaster when I was 2.12 Release Manager.

Thank you, Galen, for your role in helping so many people grow in various open-source and library technology communities.

Susan Morrison

Susan is another newer community member whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the recent Evergreen conference. As an Operations Analyst for Georgia PINES, she has been involved in a lot of PINES testing and has started contributing documentation to the Evergreen community. In addition to creating the primary documentation for the 3.10 new feature allowing authentication through OpenAthens, she has added screenshots to existing documentation, which I find to be a useful addition to any documentation. Testing and documentation are great ways to learn the software, get involved in the community, and contribute.

Thank you, Susan, for engaging in those first steps to becoming an active contributor to the Evergreen community.

Bill Erickson

I first became acquainted with Bill when we worked together on software development projects during his time as a Senior Software Developer at Equinox and then as an independent contractor after he started working for King County Library System (KCLS) in 2014. Working with Bill was always a joy. He asked good questions to fully understand the goals of a development project and delivered good quality code with minimal bugs found in testing. 

Aside from his development work, Bill has always been a consistently high contributor to the community. He is unflappable. He presents a calm and reasoned demeanor no matter what is happening in the community. He started working at KCLS at a time when the library system was disengaged from the community. He has continued his high level of community involvement since taking on that role, helping to bring KCLS back as a solid community partner. I have especially appreciated acquisitions work he has done, both in his role at Equinox and at KCLS.

Bill is a prolific coder, having authored 31 percent of the commits that have been merged into Evergreen. As a core committer and frequent Release Manager, he has also consistently reviewed and merged code coming from other contributors. Whenever I have asked him to review code from a new contributor to ensure it is meeting community coding conventions, he has been willing to do so, working with those contributors in a positive manner and creating an informative learning experience.

As a dog person, I also appreciate the fact that, in a community full of cat people, Bill is one of the few people who shares puppy photos with me.

Thank you, Bill, for your consistent code contributions and review and, as one of the original Evergreen developers, for being instrumental in creating the software responsible for this awesome community.

Michele Morgan

Michele is one of the best software testers I know. As a staff member at NOBLE, one of the original MassLNC partners, Michele and I worked closely together on many development projects. We took different approaches to testing that were an effective means to ensure all use cases were tested. When testing a complex project that introduced a series of new settings, I would methodically test each setting one at a time to ensure they worked. Michele, on the other hand, would toggle all of the new settings at one time, often breaking whatever feature had passed under my own testing method. As a core committer, I only gave cursory testing to any bug fix or feature on which Michele had already signed off. I knew any code tested by Michele had already gone through the wringer. 

While participating in the developer community, Michele has always been a big advocate for the end user. I have often heard her say she would prefer the software jump through hoops to the user jumping through hoops. Michele is always helpful to community members who ask questions in IRC. Since I’ve left the project, she has also taken a larger leadership role in the developer community, as an active participant in developer meetings and, as a core committer for the past year.  

Thank you, Michele, for your careful review of code and your continued advocacy on behalf of the end user.

Jennifer Weston

Jennifer came to the Evergreen community working in libraries that are part of NC Cardinal and is now a Product and Education Specialist for Equinox. Jennifer was just starting to take the reins of the Cataloging Interest Group around the time I left the community, but her reputation as facilitator of this group has reached my ears since then. Prior to her involvement, the interest group primarily met once a year at conference time and communicated via a mailing list as questions and issues arose. She has turned it into a group that meets monthly, collaborates with other interest groups, and advocates for cataloging improvements in an organized fashion.

Jennifer has also been active in the Documentation Interest Group and has taken responsibility for maintaining the tabular release notes. She is also a member of the Evergreen Outreach Committee. But what I, personally, am most appreciative of is her willingness to stand up and sing karaoke with me!

Thank you, Jennifer, for giving catalogers a stronger voice in the community.

Mike Rylander

Prior to the 2023 Evergreen Conference, I spoke to various community contributors to prepare for my talk on Burnout in Open-Source Communities. I was unable to schedule something with Mike Rylander ahead of time and ended up meeting with him the Tuesday night before the conference. Most discussions wrapped up within an hour; Mike and I ended up talking for well over two hours in the hotel lobby about the community, what success means for the Evergreen project, Evergreen’s complex codebase, and, my all-time favorite subject, search. As Mike dove into the details of a search idea that never came to fruition, I suddenly had a warm sense of happiness wash over me as I realized how much I’ve missed talking about search with Mike Rylander over the past five years. 

As one of the original developers of Evergreen, Mike has obviously had a huge impact on the code, authoring nearly 18% of the commits that have been merged into Evergreen. But what I appreciate most from Mike is the enthusiasm he exudes when he talks about the ideas he has for new features in the software. In fact, it was on the heels of a casual mention of one of these ideas that led to the creation of the tuit cookie. 

When sending development requirements to Equinox, Mike would often come back with a bigger project idea to make room for eventual expansion of the feature or to improve the underlying infrastructure that would support the feature. Sometimes, we had no interest in pursuing the larger idea; other times, we latched on to the new idea and made it part of the project. I always appreciated the fact that Mike was continually thinking ahead to what would best support the growth and maintainability of the software. I’ve also appreciated how effectively Mike can patiently explain a complex or highly-technical concept in multiple ways until the listener (often me) can fully grasp the idea. 

I have one quibble with Mike, though. If you look at the video of the Kathy Lussier Experience’s debut karaoke performance (posted below), you’ll see that Mike is on stage in the beginning, but quickly jumps off the stage before the singing begins. Mike, jumping off the stage was not acceptable! You will most definitely join us on stage when the Kathy Lussier Experience performs karaoke again at the next in-person Evergreen conference.

Thank you, Mike, for your ideas, your commitment to continued growth of the software, your willingness to engage in search conversations with me, and, as one of the original Evergreen developers, for being instrumental in creating the software responsible for this awesome community.

Jason Boyer

Jason has worn three work hats during his time in the Evergreen community. He started as an IT specialist in a library that is a member of Evergreen Indiana, demonstrating that you can be active in the Evergreen community even when you are working at a library in a large consortium. He went on to work for Evergreen Indiana before joining Equinox in 2019. Jason was working for Evergreen Indiana when the organization joined the MassLNC Development Initiative. Although the Initiative had no trouble coming up with enhancement ideas that would benefit library staff and patrons, we often struggled to set up a good process for getting technical feedback on our development requirements. Jason often stepped up to provide such feedback, which provides a great sanity check before requirements are posted for the larger community.

Since August 2020, Jason has led the community developer meetings, ensuring that an agenda is set, people are given sufficient advanced warning of the meeting, topics are gathered, and that the meeting actually happens. Without this type of leadership, these meetings were sometimes forgotten and skipped. Jason also made the difficult decision this week to step down from this role when he realized he didn’t have the tuits to run the meetings as effectively as he would like. As I mentioned in my conference presentation, stepping down from a role that you no longer have the time to perform well is just as important for the community as stepping up to volunteer. It leaves room for somebody with more bandwidth to perform in that role. Jason also gets additional kudos (and received additional cookies) for taking up my challenge to roll out the 3.2.3 OpenSRF release!

Thank you, Jason, for your wrangling of developers and for listening to my plea for an OpenSRF package that builds on recent Ubuntu and Debian distributions.

Chris Sharp

Chris is the sysadmin extraordinaire for Georgia PINES. Since my earliest days in the Evergreen community, Chris has been present in the IRC channel and on the lists, helping out other sysadmins with their problems and questions. He has moderated the conference sysadmin interest group since its inception and even facilitated one of the most contentious IRC meetings I’ve ever witnessed when community members debated the creation of a sysadmin mailing list. Discussions like that one can be frustrating and difficult, but they are also integral to the process of building a community where everyone feels like they can participate and their voice is valued. It’s important for people like Chris to step up and take the lead with these discussions, even if they don’t always go as planned.

Chris has been a consistent reviewer of code since becoming a core committer in 2018. He has also served in project governance multiple times and is a current Project Board member. Through the years I’ve known Chris, I’ve consistently heard him express a deep commitment to open-source software and its values. During my conference presentation, when I pulled up the quote, “Passionate about making this project succeed,” and asked with whom this statement resonated, I swear I saw Chris Sharp’s hand shoot up before anyone else’s.

Thank you, Chris, for your advocacy on behalf of sysadmins and for remaining passionate about the project’s success.

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Of course, there are so many other present and past community members whom I would love to recognize. Let’s hope I have more opportunities to do so. The entire community has made this project a place where I am happy to work, and I want to thank everyone for making me feel like I never left when I attended this year’s conference. I can’t wait to get back to working with you all again!

Final Tuit Challenge Notes

Yes, I sang American Pie along with four of my colleagues who stepped up so that I would not have to sing in public all by myself. Thank you to those who helped me sing and to those who did not stand up and walk out on me when I sang out of tune.

I also baked three batches of tuit cookies. Several people have asked me for the recipe. I plan to post the recipe soon on github. I will post it here and on my social media accounts when it’s ready.