Sahana at mukt.in 2008

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 ..

And while talking and working with guys at mukt.in, an idea popped up suddenly when krish said, “Hey AJuOnLiNE, why don’t you give a talk on Sahana“. I thought it was a great idea, but the event being in a different city and the dates of the event being quite some time ahead,  I wasn’t really sure if I would be able to make it.

But then I had the Google Bangalore office meet up and I managed to extend my stay for mukt.in and not to mention the “You should go for it!!” I got from the Sahana main-dev list and my Sahana mentor, Fran!

So here I was giving a talk on Sahana to the students of Computer Science Department at Osmania University, Hyderabad and speakers from the FOSS Community, IT Professionals, people highly experienced than me and in short it was fun pHun!

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.

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 or just share your own experience.

My event was on the very first day, we had the keynote done by Bhavin Thurakia, CEO of the DirectI Group on “Building Scalable Architecture for Web Apps“, which I found really useful, and other talks. My talk was post-lunch, and this was the *first* public talk that I presented.

I addressed audience queries from Students who found the project exciting and were willing to contribute, 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”

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…

I have the presentation available here & here.. Please feel free to post comments, and people who attended my talk are more than welcome to post their reviews!! I would love to hear from you guys!