http://www.sahanafoundation.org/about page archived on 10 May 2010

The Sahana project was initiated by volunteers in the Sri Lankan FOSS development community to help their fellow countrymen and countrywomen affected during the 2004 Asian Tsunami in December 2004. The system was officially used by the Government of Sri Lanka and the system was released as Free and Open Source software. Subsequently a re-write (phase II) as a generic disaster management tools was incubated with the sponsorship of SIDA, IBM and NSF (US) and it has be used by the Governments and NGOs in Philippines, Pakistan, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

The Sahana organization structure includes a Sahana board, a Project Management Committee (PMC), Committers and the larger Community. The description of each is given below:

Board The Sahana Board is responsible for sustaining and promoting the adoption and growth of the Sahana. The Sahana Board will actively seek to engage with private sector, academic institutions and public sector partners in promoting the adoption and support of Sahana. The Sahana Board will establish a mechanism for evaluating the success of Sahana deployments and for capturing issues about Sahana development and implementation.
Project Management Committee (PMC) - The role of the Project Management Committee (PMC) is to ensure that the community is behaving and governing itself in a manner that is consistent with the objectives of making Sahana a successful open source project. This includes operational, legal and procedural oversight on Sahana releases
Committers - Committers are those individuals who have gained the trust of the main contributors to Sahana and have direct access to contribute to the code, documentation or other Sahana resources.
Community - The largest group in Sahana consists of the larger community of about 200+ people helping to promote, provide feedback and apply Sahana Sponsors - The organizations and groups that keep us operational and running by donating funds, infrastructure and resources