Waylon Robertson <wrobertson1...@yahoo.co.nz> wrote: > What....... how... who.... what madness is this? Did they even look > at Koha? NZ, the birthplace of Koha... has, at a national level, > rejected Koha? Or did they not know about Koha? Koha wasn't good > enough for them?..... I feel ... like using lots of strong words.
Did the National Library of NZ use a procurement process? Our co-op has no-one in that timezone at the moment, so we wouldn't have been watching. Anyone here (supplier or librarian) see it? Did it disadvantage Koha in some way? That might have been by structuring the purchase in a way which favours all-in-one "black box" LMSes rather than combinations of FOSS projects, using a specification drafted by legacy LMS suppliers, by not taking into account the exit cost of migrating away from a closed non-standard LMS at the end of its contract period, or by requiring suppliers to take some legal form which no Koha supplier currently uses. Those are some of the reasons I often think procurement processes are broken. Our public services often pay over the odds to reward private suppliers for gambling relatively large sums on playing nonsensical bidding games. Worse, there's often fairly large spending by the public service to run the game and answer the inevitable questions about it. I suspect fairly few social enterprises play if they have alternative sources of income. I feel libraries seem a bit short-sighted on this sort of thing. Each extra dollar a supplier spends to win business (on procurement processes, on expensive trade fairs run by so-called professional bodies that are slowly becoming private enterprises, on glossy brochures and sweatshop-made plastic promotional products mailed out to libraries, ...) is an extra dollar which some library must be charged, plus administration cost. If you'd like the biggest bang-per-buck, please reward suppliers who spend their marketing money in ethical ways that also support libraries or public communities. Look at a trade fair stand and ask: what use is that to anyone? Look at free gifts and ask: who does this help? What is its point? </rant> ;-) Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op. http://koha-community.org supporter, web and LMS developer, statistician. In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Available for hire for Koha work http://www.software.coop/products/koha _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list http://koha-community.org Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha
