Sahana Software Foundation 2012 GSOC Program Page

The Sahana Community Development Committee would like to welcome everyone to the 2012 Sahana Google Summer of Code. We are excited to be a mentoring organization in 2012. Sahana has successfully been a part of the Google Summer of Code every year from 2006 through 2011. These involvements have been very effective in building both our projects and our community, so we are looking forward to having another productive year as well.
We announced the seven recipients of GSOC internships with the Sahana Software Foundation on our website. This page will be updated with details and links on our student's projects throughout the summer.

• Anubhav Aggarwal - Database Migration - Sahana Eden
• Ahmed Alinat - Export of Missing/Found Persons Info - Sahana Vesuvius
• Ramindu Deshapriya - Full Multiple Language Support - Sahana Vesuvius
• Shashi Gowda - Common Alerting Protocol Broker - Sahana Eden
• Vivek Hamirwasia - Upgrade Translation Functionality - Sahana Eden
• Bhaavan Merchant - CERT: Rostering - Sahana Eden
• Ashwyn Sharma - CERT: Parsing SMS Messages - Sahana Eden

Instructions on how to participate in the Google Summer of Code are available from the main GSOC site which is used for managing the program. The FAQs provides a lot of useful information about the program and how it works. Please also review the user guide, and the timeline. Interested students should subscribe to the GSOC discussion list. Finally, there is a Student Guide that should be essential reading for any student interested in participating in the Google Summer of Code.

Most open source projects are about developing tools for open source developers as a social good. Sahana software projects are different; they are about providing open source solutions for disaster victims and those seeking to help disaster victims. It is about the essence of humanitarianism; doing good in the world. Completing a project for the Sahana Software Foundation as part of the Google Summer of Code is a great way to contribute to the world and to learn about open source software.

The vision of the Sahana Software Foundation is to build and sustain a global open and collaborative community of contributors to information and communications technologies for disaster management. We have a strong commitment to free and open source community development. We have been a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code every year since 2006, and have a deep team of mentors who are experienced at working with new contributors to Sahana software projects.

The Sahana Software Foundation was established in 2009 to govern Sahana free and open source disaster management software projects as a non-profit organization to serve the needs and requirements of a diverse group of customers: Government agencies and jurisdictions at the national, provincial or state, and local levels; UN Agencies, international and local charitable organizations (NGOs); communities & disaster victims; technology companies & software developers. 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.Our software projects are some of the few humanitarian free and open source software (FOSS) projects that are now revolutionizing information management for international disaster response operations. Sahana software was originally developed in Sri Lanka in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami by members of the Sri Lankan IT community who wanted to find a way to apply their talents towards helping their country recover from that disaster. (Sahana means “relief” in Sinhalese, one of the national languages of Sri Lanka).

Since 2004, work on Sahana software has grown into a global effort with hundreds of volunteer contributors from dozens of countries working on multiple FOSS projects supported a non-profit organization. Sahana software has supported national and local authorities and relief agencies respond to numerous large scale sudden onset disasters, including, most recently, Chilean wildfires, the Japan Sendai earthquake and tsunami, the Haiti earthquake, flooding in Pakistan, and the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The Sahana Software Foundation is the home to multiple open source projects and we will be offering opportunities for students to work with each of our projects. Our Sahana Eden project is written in Python using Web2Py. Our Sahana Agasti project supports two distinct release branches based in PHP - Vesuvius, which supports Missing Persons and hospital management, and Mayon, which provides resource management and scenario planning solutions. All of these projects support important customers in the emergency and disaster management world, including the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (Eden), the US National Library of Medicine (Vesuvius), the City of New York's Office of Emergency Management (Mayon), the Los Angeles City Emergency Management Department (Eden), and many others.

Students interested in completing a GSOC project with our Sahana Eden project should familiarize themself with the Sahana Eden Essential Guide and consider participating in our Sahanathon.

The best way to reach our community and designated mentors for support and questions is through our main discussion e-mail list. We invite all students to please subscribe to discuss@lists.sahanafoundation.org. We use IRC as the main channel of live communication and support. Our main chat room is #sahana on freenode (irc.freenode.net). For those without a chat client, freenode has a web-based chat page. You can visit the Sahana Community IRC page for more information. Please send any questions you may have and please identify yourself as a GSOC particpant and you will be warmly received (if not, please let us know).

Our wiki will contain all updated information about the Sahana Software Foundation's GSOC program here on our main Sahana 2012 Google Summer of Code page, as well as general information about Sahana and our work. All announcements will be made on the wiki, through our discussion list, and/or on the Sahana Software Foundation website.
For more information: Contact Sahana's Google Summer of Code Program Administrators at gsoc at sahanafoundation dot org

Sahana Software Foundation GSOC 2012 Ideas Page

• Both new and prior GSOC Students with the Sahana Software Foundation will be considered as applicants.
• Students must submit a bug fix for the project first. (Please engage with proposed mentors to identify an appropriate bug that will demonstrate your skills and capabilities).
• Students should get involved with projects now.
• Our priorities and project ideas are likely to be weighted more favorably.

Visit 2012 Sahana GSOC Student Guidelines for a full list of student guidelines, including the required application template.

Interested in mentoring? We are recruiting experienced Sahana contributors - both developers and domain experts, to serve as mentors again this year. Former Sahana GSOC students are strongly encouraged to help mentor Sahana GSOC projects. We will assign two mentors to every project - a primary technical mentor (an experienced Sahana developer) and a backup who may be a domain expert or another technical resource - which helps balance the time commitment required to be able to effectively contribute. Mentors are assigned through each project's PMC.

Interested mentors should review the GSOC Mentoring Guide

Note: Mentors will be responsible for reviewing & merging student code into our main codebases after the end of GSOC.

See SSF GSOC Mentor Responsibilities for more information.