Sahana @mukt.in 2008 Hyderabad, India
mukt.in is a FOSS promotion event which attracts audiences who are Newbies, Students, Professional, FOSS Advocates [not lawyers ;-)] , and speakers from other FOSS Projects/communities… This year the venue was Computer Science Department, Osmania University, Hyderabad. It was a 3 Day event, 1-3 August, 2008, currently in their second year of running.
Being introduced to Sahana was something that happened to me over an year back while working for my academic project, where I checked out Sahana and got to know about it.
With Google Summer of Code 2008 I got a chance to *actually* work and contribute ..
My main agenda at the event was to showcase:
- what Sahana is
- how kOoL it is
- how it *has* been used in post-disaster situations
- how can people/community contribute to it..
The best thing about contributing to Sahana, is you don’t really have to be a programmer in order to contribute. If you are an expert in any of the Domain/areas which concerns with the technology used, the humanitarian domain, an NGO, an independent citizen journalist, a Usability expert… you could just hop in to our mailing lists, share your knowledge, make suggestions, post feedback about the application & just share your own experience. Every bit helps!
Addressing audience queries from Students, who found the project exciting and were willing to contribute, I told them how they could go about working on the project, how Sahana can be used in India, scope for Translation, what kind of technologies it uses and how the students can learn from the code base and get started using the resources available.
I had a bunch of professionals curious to know about Sahana, some of them had never heard of something like this, and were really fascinated by the idea. So talking for Sahana and as a Sahana Developer I felt great and excited to… “talk” 
After my talk, I also demonstrated the Sahana installation I had and features of the Sahana DMS.
It would be really great to see some of them, students, coming forward and getting into action with the Sahana code and more people coming to know about Sahana and spreading awareness…