The Sahana Software Foundation

The Sahana Software Foundation was established in 2009 as a 501[c][3] non-profit organization in the State of California.

The mission of the Sahana Software Foundation is:

To help alleviate human suffering by giving emergency managers, disaster response professionals and communities access to the information that they need to better prepare for and respond to disasters through the development and promotion of free and open source software and open standards.

The (first) annual meeting of the Members and Directors of the Sahana Software Foundation took place on May 2, 2010 in Seattle, Washington. The meeting was held in the Yosemite room on the 3rd floor of the Crowne Plaza Hotel. Minutes will be posted soon. Please see:

• 2010 Annual Meeting Announcement or ssf-annual-meeting-notice.pdf
• Members Meeting Agenda
• Board Meeting Agenda
• Attendees at Annual Meeting
• Members Proxy Form: ssf_proxy_2010.pdf
• Annual Meeting Minutes
• Board Meeting Record of Decision

Gartner Inc. has named the Sahana Software Foundation a Cool Vendor in Risk Management and Compliance for 2010 for its Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) approach to disaster management. The note recommends Sahana software for Government emergency and disaster relief managers, humanitarian aid organizations, business continuity management professionals and academic institutions. See our website for more information.

On 23 March 2010, the Sahana Software Foundation received the PPBI 2010 Best Practices award for our response to the Haiti Earthquake. The Best Practices award is given annually by PPBI (Public Private Business, Inc.), a not-for-profit corporation with a mission to link the private and public sectors in effective emergency management and disaster recovery planning. The award was presented during a general session before several hundred attendees of the DRJ Spring World Conference (sponsored by Disaster Recovery Journal - the largest business continuity planning conference in the US)

Read the PPBI Press Release

Articles of Incorporation as filed with the California Secretary of State on July 1, 2009
Articles of Incorporation as adopted by the Transition Board on June 9, 2009
The Articles of Incorporation in wiki form

The current version of the Bylaws in wiki form
The official Bylaws

List of the Board of Directors
List of the Officers
Resolutions passed by the Transition Board of the Sahana Software Foundation
Resolutions passed by the Board of the Sahana Software Foundation

The Directors of the Sahana Software Foundation have established the following Executive Committees of the Board:

• Community Development Committee
• Financial Oversight Committee

Sahana GSOC 2010 Main Page

The Sahana Software Foundation uses various licenses to distribute software and documentation, to accept regular contributions from individuals and corporations, and to accept larger grants of existing software products. These licenses help us achieve our goal of providing reliable and long-lived software products through collaborative open source software development. In all cases, contributors retain full rights to use their original contributions for any other purpose outside of the Foundation while providing the SSF and its projects the right to distribute and build upon their work within the Foundation.

All software produced by the Sahana Software Foundation or any of its projects or subjects are licensed through OSI licenses.

• Sahana Agasti is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
• Sahana Eden is licensed under the MIT (or X11) License.
  

The Sahana Software Foundation requires a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) to be signed and returned by all Members, PMC members and Committers and requests them of anyone contributing their intellectual property (code or design requirements or ideas) to Sahana projects. This serves to protect everyone's rights and ensures SSF can legally and publicly redistribute Sahana's code. The purpose of this agreement is to clearly define the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to the SSF and thereby allow us to defend the project should there be a legal dispute regarding the software at some future time. SSF committers will be responsible for ensuring that all code contributions come from only those who have signed a CLA before merging code into the trunk. (So if you don't sign and return a CLA, your code contributions will not become a part of the main development branch of Sahana nor will it be included in any releases from the Sahana Software Foundation).

An Individual CLA may be downloaded here and may be scanned and returned to cla-submissions at SahanaFoundation dot org. Alternative means of return by post or fax are provided on the form.

For a corporation that has assigned employees to work on a Sahana Software Foundation project, a Corporate CLA is available for contributing intellectual property via the corporation, that may have been assigned as part of an employment agreement. Note that a Corporate CLA does not remove the need for every developer to sign their own CLA as an individual, to cover any of their contributions which are not owned by the corporation signing the CLA.

List of Individuals and Organizations Signing Contributor License Agreements (CLAs)

When an individual or corporation decides to donate a body of existing software or documentation to one of the Sahana Software Foundation (SSF) projects, they need to execute a formal Software Grant Agreement (SGA) with the SSF. Typically, this is done after negotiating approval with the SSF Incubator or one of the PMCs, since the SSF will not accept software unless there is a viable community available to support a collaborative project.

Software Grant Agreement template

Initial Membership Release
Initial Membership Release
Member Nomination Form
List of Members of the Sahana Software Foundation

The Board has established the following Projects:

• Technical Projects:
  • Sahana Agasti Project and Project Management Committee
  • Sahana Eden Project and Project Management Committee
• Coordination Projects:
  • Sahana Standards and Interoperability Project and Project and Project Management Committee

See SSF Project Naming Conventions for guidelines of Sahana Technical Project Names

1023 Filing Receipt from the IRS