The Gartner Group’’s Roberta Witty recently blogged on Sahana in “Sahana: A Free, Open Source Disaster Relief Management System” following a conference call I participated in with her this past Tuesday along with fellow Sahana transition board members Brent Woodworth and Mifan Careem.  It’s a nice write-up from an influential source - the Gartner Group is the premier analysis and research authority in the IT industry - that I hope will help spread the word about Sahana’s benefits and bring more contributors into the community from the emergency management field.  An excerpt follows:

Sometimes the best things in life are still free, and good news can come from surprising sources. On Tuesday, Rick DeLotto and I were briefed by the Sahana Project, an award winning, free and open source, web-based disaster relief management system designed to “Help alleviate human suffering and help save lives through the efficient use of IT during a disaster”. It was first developed by the open source community, and is maintained by volunteers, with support from IBM, Google, NSF and Sida. You should run right over to Sahana and get a look at it, tell your friends, and spread the word. It might be just what your home town needs to keep YOU safe.

Sahana Community,

It is my pleasure to announce the students who will be participating in this years Google Summer of Code for Sahana.  We received 45 applicants from eight different countries this year for only 10 spots. I would like to personally congratulate both those who we are able to bring into the GSoC program as well as all the other applicants as the field of candidates was truly outstanding.  We look forward to working with these students throughout the summer and hope to form relationships that last for years to come for Sahana and the Humanitarian ICT communities.  We thank all the students who have applied for this program and apologize that we were only able to accept such a limited number.

The following students have been accepted for this years program:
Kethees Selladurai
Ajay Kumar
Khushbu Mohta
Praneeth Bodduluri
Gihan Chamara
Hasanat Kazmi
Shree Kent Bohra
Nithin Dara
Iroshan Horathalge
Akshit Sharma

Descriptions of these projects can be found at http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/sahana.

Thank you,

David Bitner
Sahana PMC
Sahana Google Summer of Code Administrator