Paul Reynolds, an influential advocate, collaborator, and mentor in the Kete community has passed away.
I'm sad to say that Paul Reyolds from McGovern passed away yesterday. He was a long standing member of the Kete community that helped shape both the software's and the community's direction.
As an advocate, Paul regularly wrote about Kete's accomplishments and progress on his blog peoplepoints. He also sometimes discussed Kete with Jim Mora on Radio New Zealand National or during conferences for the GLAM sector.
Paul worked on the direction of the Chinese Digital Community with the New Zealand Chinese Association Auckland Branch and Auckland City Libraries as a consultant well before Kete was selected to power the site. His ideas, along with other McGovern staff, contributed to the shape of the second phase of Kete development that the Chinese Digital Community project pushed forward. Paul was a helpful and fun collaborator that brought a detailed eye to the work we did together.
After the success of Kete Horowhenua, Kete was being considered as the community repository to accompany network access for Aotearoa Peoples Network Kaharoa member libraries and Paul, along with John Truesdale at National Library of New Zealand, strongly supported adding features to make Creative Commons NZ licenses available in Kete and the ability to harvest metadata from the Kete sites for inclusion in the Digital New Zealand service. He had a holistic vision for empowering online users in New Zealand by helping to put the critical building blocks of permissive content licensing, collaboration tools, and easily sharing content across sites in place.
Whenever you see an item that you enjoy on a Kete site that has Creative Commons license that makes it easy to share and extend, you are seeing a small sample of Paul's good work.
Whenever you do a search on Kete site (or Te Papa Collections Online, etc.) and get a useful list of links from other content providers that makes it easier for you to find what you are after, you are seeing an idea that Paul advocated for come to fruition.
In the last six months I talked to Paul about my ideas for the next phase of Kete development and what projects this new work would be good for and he instantly "got it". He was excited by the possibilities and gave me good advice about how to proceed. He was a valuable mentor to me.
Kete is certainly better for Paul's input. I am better for my work and friendship with Paul. He will be missed. My condolences to his family.
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James Stradling
said My thoughts on Paul Reynolds.
My feelings go out to Paul's family too.
Although I only met him a couple of times, one of them being at the 2008 NDF while I was a part of the Kete team at Katipo, it was obvious straight away he was a hugely respected guy, and deservedly so. He had a level of insight and vision that was beyond my own.
But from memory and from reading the stories people have shared about him since his passing, I think one of the most unique things about Paul was his ability to share his knowledge and to inspire so many people, both inside and outside of the sector.
Since meeting him I've continued listening to his afternoon spots on Radio New Zealand and it has always been full of great insights.
Still a bit shocked he has gone so suddenly.
James