Open Source Contributions

My open source journey has profoundly shaped how I think about software development, even in professional settings. As I wrote in my blog post Maintaining Shared Software Tooling in an Organization:

Well-maintained shared tools — whether open source projects or internal libraries — are easy to adapt, have the backing of dedicated maintainers, and can be extended quickly. But keeping them alive requires more than initial enthusiasm. As I've seen in both open source communities and corporate teams, it's the mundane work that kills a project: updating dependencies, fixing security holes, adapting to new paradigms. The excitement of building something new fades, and without organizational conviction that maintenance is a worthwhile pursuit of time, these tools wither.

The best open source organizations succeed when they create structures — whether through democratic governance, implementation contracts, or community support — that sustain the heroic efforts of those who keep projects up to date. The same principle applies inside any software organization.

The Sahana Software Foundation is a nonprofit organization that builds free and open source software for disaster and emergency management. The name "Sahana" means relief in Sinhalese, one of the national languages of Sri Lanka, where the project was born. As I noted in a blog post, the foundation — of which I am a member — sustains itself through implementation partnerships for their Sahana EDEN software.

Sahana was created in the aftermath of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, when a team of Sri Lankan technologists built software to help the government coordinate relief for those affected. What began as an emergency response tool grew into a global open source project supported by hundreds of volunteer contributors from dozens of countries.

Sahana software has been officially deployed by governments including Sri Lanka, the United States, Pakistan, the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Taiwan, and China. The project was recognized with the 2006 Free Software Foundation Award for Projects of Social Benefit and was featured in the BBC World documentary The Code-Breakers.

Notable Deployments

Sahana software has been deployed in response to real-world disasters around the globe:

I was involved in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) across five consecutive years, progressing from student to mentor to organization administrator — a journey that reflects how deeply open source shaped my early career. Sahana participated as a GSoC mentoring organization from 2006 through 2014.

My GSoC Journey

Vesuvius is Sahana's disaster preparedness platform focused on the needs of the medical community. Its development was led by the US National Library of Medicine as part of the Bethesda Hospitals Emergency Preparedness Partnership (BHEPP).

The platform serves two critical functions during disasters:

🔍 Missing Persons Reporting — Contributes to family reunification by accepting reports through multiple channels and providing advanced search and filtering capabilities to match missing persons with found individuals.

🏨 Hospital Triage Management — Provides tools to assist in local and remote hospital triage, including photo capture and electronic notifications of patient intake records across hospitals and person locator registries.

The NLM deployed the Vesuvius People Locator system during the Haiti Earthquake (2010), Christchurch Earthquake (2011), and Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (2011), directly helping families find their loved ones in the aftermath of these disasters.