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…

The talk slides are available here & here…

Following the Sahana activities in Myanmar, the DUMBO(Digital Ubiquitous Mobile Broadband OLSR)-Sahana project has taken wings and is seeing a lot of success. The links below provide interesting insight into the wonderful work taking place:
DUMBO-Sahana in Myanmar
Nargis Action Group, Myanmar
Interlab Training Photos

Last year, Ravindra and I had the honor of presenting Sahana at the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security of Thailand, in Bangkok, Thailand. We noticed at the event that there were already a couple of University students from Thailand working on Sahana, which is always an encouragement, and in line with the overall goal of creating Sahana communities globally. I just came across a couple of articles of the event, which I link to here (some in Thai..)
Sahana Disaster Management System (thai)
Thailand’s Ministry of Social Development and Human Security has intention to use Sahana
IOSN Article

And another article on Sahana, this time from the recent Sichuan earthquake deployment - unfortunately for those of us with poor language skills, only available in Mandarin! Thanks to Qihao Miao from the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of Shanghai, who wrote the article and hopefully will continue to be involved with Sahana.

Erm… if anybody out there speaks Mandarin, a translation would be lovely!

Sahana makes a brief appearance in BusinessWeek, courtesy of Janet Ginsburg. The article is a wider discussion of the role of disaster response in innovation (and vice versa), with a focus on the Strong Angel III exercise a while back. The emphasis on Sahana as an innovative approach (FOSS), and not just an innovative platform is good to see!

Ok - pretty outdated. But, as part of my pledge to get anything and everything on Sahana blogged, here goes.

Sahana was mentioned in this Open Letter to the community by MySQL founders: David Axmark and Michel Widenius

Some other awe-inspiring MySQL stats that show the momentum of MySQL:
Major free software projects and hugely-popular Web sites such as the Sahana (disaster recovery system for the tsunami), Ensembl.org and Human Genome Project (used for cancer research), Wikipedia, Bugzilla, Craigslist, Feedster, Flickr, Freshmeat, LiveJournal, Neopets, Slashdot, SugarCRM, Technorati, Wordpress, CERN’s ATLAS Experiment — all taking advantage of MySQL’s speed, ease of use, flexibility, scalability and ecosystem.

Source

In 2006, Networkworld named Sahana in the list of the top 10 Open Source companies to watch out for:

Networkworld Article: Top 10 Open Source Companies to watch out for
Their next article, published sometime later, showed that their predictions were spot on, as Sahana went on to receive the FSF Award for Social Benefit 2006, after the first article was published:
Networkworld: Top 10 Open Source Companies: Where are they now

Link to the original article:

“Sahana, an entirely volunteer effort to create technology for managing large-scale relief efforts, is the recipient of the 2006 Free Software Foundation Award for Projects of Social Benefit.”

FSF Article on the FSF Social Benefit Award 2006
Linux.com Article