Beautiful Vancouver, BC, Canada was the site of the 2013 International Evergreen Conference last April. There were 191 people at the conference from Canada, US, Netherlands and Finland. We had 183 viewers watching the live stream from: US, Canada, Czech Republic, Japan, Mexico, Finland and the UK.

Here are some highlights of the conference:

The State of Evergreen – Evergreen Community Overview

Kathy Lussier from MassLNC outlined the many accomplishments over the past year coming from the Evergreen community. There is now a stable release schedule, with elected release managers to guide the software through the development process. There was the first Hack-a-Way in Georgia, where developers could get together and have big picture discussions about development, as well as work on current projects. There were 1,081 code and document commits over the year by 41 contributors. There were a number of first time committers as well. For documentation, the doc repository was merged with the code repository. There have also been efforts to move documentation up to newer versions of the software. Four Evergreen community members participated in a Google Doc Sprint with the end product being a comprehensive Evergreen reference book, “Evergreen in Action: so you’ve installed 2.3 – now what?” In other conference news, it was reported that we have been accepted to the Google Summer of Code for the third year in a row.

Also, throughout the conference, the topic of QA for the Evergreen code was addressed in some form or another. MassLNC is bringing in some software experts to do performance testing of the software. Equinox is in the process of raising funds for QA testing.

Evergreen Oversight Board Meeting – Initiatives

The Board met at the conference and discussed its direction for the upcoming year. The Board communicated its two main themes to the membership the last day of the conference – 1. Showing people how to help in the community and 2. Improving Evergreen’s quality.

Evergreen Conference Programs – Some Highlights

There were two program tracks this year, a general track and a more technical track. The programs ranged in topic from helpful instruction for beginners such as Lebbeous Fogle-Weekley’s “Contributing Code to Evergreen is Easier Than You Think” and Andrea Buntz Neiman’s “Cataloging in Evergreen,” to the more technical – Melissa Lefebvre’s “How to Gitify Your Changes: The Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy Way” and David Busby’s “Searching with Solr,” a bolt-on for Evergreen. Grace Dunbar and Mike Rylander explained “How to Talk to Developers” for a lighter, but insightful look at what works when requesting new development or reporting bugs to Evergreen developers – be specific, be thoughtful, be courteous, be descriptive. The Lightning Talks were in full force with more good instruction like Yamil Suarez’s “Submitting a Bug to Launchpad” and exciting development updates like Ben Shum’s mobile webpac work.

Comments from Conference Goers

“This was my second Evergreen International Conference and I have to say it is always worth the trip to see all the "cool kids". It is a great opportunity to actually meet the people behind aliases and email addresses. I have never left these conferences empty handed. I don't think we need to go fishing to realize that the conference is a true representation of what is at the core of our community. Working together to make the future of Evergreen brighter for us and our patrons.”

Olli-Antti Kivilahti Open library 2014 Joensuu Regional Library

"My first experience with the Evergreen International Conference came in 2012 when the conference was hosted in Indianapolis. Because it was so close, and because I was so new to the larger Evergreen community, I didn’t appreciate the significance of either the conference or that larger community. This year, I was really able to digest the unique and valuable nature of this conference. It is fairly unprecedented to have developers and end-users work so closely on a software product, but the international Evergreen community is actively working to include the library and the librarian in the “integrated library system.” I’m really proud to be associated with Evergreen ILS and excited about its future as a fundamental component to ultimately creating an exceptional library experience for our patrons."

– Ruth Frasur Director of the Historic(ally Awesome) Hagerstown - Jefferson Township Library

“What impressed me the most is the need for everyone to contribute to the Evergreen system by contributing code, testing code, adding comments to posts, and reporting areas in the software needing improvements or fixes. It was great to hear of the many projects staff are working towards or have completed.” Joan Kranich C/W MARS Member Services

Final Comments from Tara Robertson, 2013 International Evergreen Conference Committee

Thank you everyone who came to Vancouver, or turned in over the live stream, IRC or Twitter. We were thrilled to welcome you to Vancouver and hope you got what you wanted to get out of the conference.

So many thank yous! Thank you to all of our awesome sponsors: http://eg2013.evergreen-ils.org/sponsors/ Thanks you to folks who donated door prizes: http://eg2013.evergreen-ils.org/many-thanks-to-our-door-prize-sponsors/ Thank you to all the presenters: http://eg2013.evergreen-ils.org/speakers/ Special thank you to Joshua Berkus (Accidental DBA: http://eg2013.evergreen-ils.org/schedule/session-descriptions/#accidental) and Josh Berkus (How to choose the right hardware: http://eg2013.evergreen-ils.org/schedule/session-descriptions/#hardware) who are from outside the Evergreen community and paid their own way to Vancouver to present. Thank you to the program advisory committee: Anoop Atre, Shauna Borger, Chris Sharp, Matt Carlson, and a special thanks to Dan Scott who went way, way above and beyond. Thank you to Dan Scott and Galen Charlton for providing leadership during the hackfest. Thank you to Yamil Suarez for wrangling the Lightning Talks. Thank you to our amazing volunteers Kimberly Garmoe, Eka Grguric, Mary Jinglewski, Jonathan Kift, Jonathan Schatz and David Waddell for the live note taking (http://eg2013.evergreen-ils.org/live/) and helping streaming the tech track. A special thank you to Samantha Mills for the fancy video editing work editing work from the main track to incorporate the slides, an intro and titles.

All of the video has been uploaded to the Internet Archive (and tagged with #egcon2013 http://archive.org/search.php?query=%23egcon2013%20AND%20collection%3Aopensource_movies) and linked back to the conference website.

Thank you to other people who stepped up in various ways to help during the conference, especially the locals who led the no-host lunch groups. Thank you to Ben Hyman for giving us space and support to plan and organize. A massively huge thank you to the rest of the organizing committee. It truly was a team effort. • Anita Cocchia, BCELN - venue, hotel, budget • Caroline Daniels, KPU - venue, hotel, budget • Mark Ellis, RPL - registrar, volunteer coordinator • Mark Jordan, SFU - hackfest coordinator, DIY video streaming • Paul Joseph, UBC - website, social event • Shirley Lew, VCC - program, sponsorship, streaming

Hope to see you in Boston next year!

If you have news items for the Evergreen newsletter, please send them to terlaga@biblio.org.