Professor Jeff Sonstein has contributed to discussions about Sahana in the past, and I’ve found those contributions to be very useful. His approach is very much from the user side rather than the developer side, which to be perfectly honest has been a big gap in the Sahana community. He sent around a message on the sahana-user mailing list, with a link to this page of feedback on the Sahana UI.

One of the classes I am again teaching this term here at RIT is called Website Design & Implementation… Sahana was conceived during a real emergency to meet real needs. Over time, the great work done by the initial and follow-up development teams has fleshed out the system to add needed functionality. This is a great start, but one major area needing work now that Sahana has grown so is that of the “user experience”. I wanted to comment on four (4) areas which came up in today’s in-class discussion of Sahana, all of which pertain to the “user experience” encountering Sahana.

All of these comments are worth considering - very specific to Sahana, but rooted in good practice in usability. We could use more feedback like this which can help developers to move towards a more usable version of Sahana - so if anybody out there has anything like that, then please feel free to join the community at sahana-user. It’s difficult to engage non-technical people in the Sahana effort, but this kind of feedback can be a useful contribution from anybody.

UPDATE: another good example of non-technical contributions to Sahana is the translation process, which has a home at Sahana Online Translation, thanks to the astonishing commitment of Dominic Konig - thanks Dominic!

(This post is cross-posted at humanitarian.info.)