Our New Maintainer: Sandra Kuipers

Dear Gibbon Community Members,

Today we have the great pleasure to announce that Sandra Kuipers is stepping up her commitment to the Gibbon project, and taking on the role of Maintainer.

For those of you who have been active in the project over the past years, this ought not come as a surprise: Sandra has made a massive contribution to the direction of the project, to the codebase, and to our community. In Sandra we are lucky to have found someone who believes in the power of open source, who is technically adept and loves to learn, and who is willing to drive things forward in a steady, organised and patient manner.

When I started Gibbon at ICHK 8 years ago, the aim was always to build a tool that met our needs as a school, but that would be flexible and scalable enough to handle the needs any school, anywhere in the world. It ought not reside, I believed, in just one school, dependent on one person, but should be community driven. The hope was that a project like Gibbon could empower educators, and grow to become the nexus of a self-sustaining community that helped schools around the world. Sandra’s work on Gibbon, based out of TIS Macao, and the steady growth of our community over the past 3 years, serve to demonstrate the viability of the original vision, and suggest that we are moving steadily in the right direction.

Thousands of hours in, my own dedication to the Gibbon project remains undimmed: if anything, I am more excited by Gibbon than ever. I will continue to code on Gibbon, as Sandra and I develop new ways to collaborate (for example, mutually reviewing each other’s code commits). Sandra will pick up responsibility for setting technical direction, reviewing community commits, and for growing the developer community. My focus will turn the vital work of establishing a Gibbon Foundation, fundraising and advocacy.

ICHK have long been extremely supportive of Gibbon, and are still at the heart of the Gibbon project. It remains our pleasure, as a school, to be in a position to work with so many other wonderful educators and technical leaders as we share and develop our creation.

I am sure you will join me in thanking Sandra for all her tireless work, and in wishing her the best of luck as she embarks on this new role.

Ross

Gibbon Founder