[Sahana_proj] Sahana wins the 2006 social benefit award

[de Lanerolle, Trishan R.]

HINT: At the end you will also find the names for two other finalist,
good leads to follow up on for this weeks assignment.


Sahana wins the 2006 social benefit award


http://www.fsf.org/social-benefit-award-2006

 

Sahana, an entirely volunteer effort to create technology for managing
large-scale relief efforts, is the recipient of the 2006 Free Software
Foundation Award for Projects of Social Benefit. 

Colombo, Sri Lanka and Cambridge, Massachussets---March 26,
2007---Sahana, an entirely volunteer effort to create technology for
managing large-scale relief efforts, is the recipient of the 2006 Free
Software Foundation Award for Projects of Social Benefit. Sahana was
created, in the wake of the tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia in
2004, to compensate for the devastating consequences of a government
attempt to manually manage the process of locating victims, distributing
aid and coordinating volunteers. 

The Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented to a
free software project that intentionally and significantly benefits
society through collaboration to accomplish an important social task. 

Speaking at the award ceremony, the Sahana project leader Chamindra de
Silva said, "We are deeply honored to receive this award and were so
excited we traveled half way around the world from Sri Lanka to attend
the ceremony today. The Sahana project is all about a cohesive disaster
response between multiple agencies and bringing them together to help
victims.  None of this would have been possible without the work of the
wider free software community, and we would not have been able to bring
benefit to the victims and the people who help the victims without that.
It is a credit to the whole community." 

Richard Stallman, President and Founder of the Free Software Foundation,
in presenting the award said, "We were inspired to create this award
when we heard of the tremendous good the Sahana project was able to
achieve through the use of free software. With this award we give
recognition to their efforts." 

The founding team, made up of Sri Lankan technology workers, worked
around the clock for three days to produce the first release of the
software that was quickly adopted by their country's government. The
software resolves common coordination problems that arise during a
disaster and thus facilitates the search for missing people, aid and
volunteer management, and victim tracking across refugee camps. 

Sahana is built completely on donated funds and volunteer effort
coordinated by Lanka Software Foundation. It has been officially
deployed by the governments of Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Philippies, and
Indonesia. It was also part of the Strong Angel III, a test of US civil
and military disaster response. 

The members of the founding team that traveled from Colombo to Cambridge
to accept the award were, Chamindra de Silva, project lead, as well as
lead developers Pradeeper Dharmendra, Ravindra de Silva and Mifan
Careem. 

Every year, three finalists are nominated for the award by the free
software community. This year's other two finalists were Project
Gutenberg and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). 

Previous winners of the free software award: 

*	2005 Wikipedia 


About Sahana


For more information about Sahana, please visit http://www.sahana.lk/.
Parties interested in contributing to Sahana should send an email to
donate at sahana.lk <mailto:donate at sahana.lk> . 


About the Free Software Foundation


The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting
computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute
computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as
in freedom) software-particularly the GNU operating system and its
GNU/Linux variants-and free documentation for free software. The FSF
also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of
freedom in the use of software. Their web site, located at www.fsf.org
<http://www.fsf.org/> , is an important source of information about
GNU/Linux. Donations to
support their work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org
<http://donate.fsf.org/> . They are headquartered in Boston, MA, USA. 

 

 

 

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