Sahana 2009 Conference
The first ever Sahana 2009 Conference in Colombo is over, and I safely returned to Sweden. Thanks to our host, the Lanka Software Foundation, for the excellent arrangement and all the comfort we experienced.
It was an impressive event and an exciting tour from the history to future of the Sahana project, with interesting insights and prospects on ICT in emergency management. But it was also hard work to build the future of Sahana, mainly at the meetings and discussions – offline and online – from breakfast to late night.
The first two days were dominated by a long list of presentations, and many first ever face-to-face meetings of Sahana people who only knew each other from chatrooms and mailing lists. In the course of this conference I also had the chance to present my paper about Sahana Internationalization, and to sow some ideas in this regard.
On the third day, Respere had invited for a Barcamp which turned out to a great chance for understanding among project leads, emergency management experts and code writers. Many of the discussions started there still continue on the main development mailing lists and are echoed in the Sahana GSoC proposals.
On the same day we started with the Sahana.next meetings where we discussed about the future operative structure and governance of the Sahana project, in order to continue fostering Sahana as a global free and open-source software project. As a result of this some pathbreaking decisions have been made, which will now be implemented within the next months. More details and recent news about this can always be found on the Sahana website.
