Last week I was able to attend linux.conf.au which was being hosted in my home town of Auckland. This was a great chance to spend time with people from the open source community from New Zealand, Australia and around the world.

I was part of the Open Source for Humanitarian Tech Miniconf (http://linux.conf.au/schedule/30223/view_talk?day=monday), which also included, along with Kate Chapman from the Humanitarian Open Street Map Team (HOT), Noel Taylor from Map My Rights and Chris Daley who has worked for a number of humanitarian organizations. If you’re interested, here’s a copy of my slides and a video of my presentation:

The Community Leadership Summit gave me a couple of ideas for recognizing the outstanding efforts of the our Community: Firstly I’m going to share more of the success stories which show how valuable the contributions people make to Sahana are (Watch this space!). Secondly I’ve tried to update http://eden.sahanafoundation.org/wiki/Develop to indicate the sort of contributions that are most appreciated and how they are recognized: If your code is merged into trunk – that’s a valuable contribution. If you’ve closed a ticket, updated the wiki docs, written tests for the code and helping others on the mailing list – then that’s REALLY valuable). If you’ve got other ideas, please leave a comment!

Former Sahana board member Leslie Hawthorn gave an insightful presentation on “Checking Your Privilege” (Slides / Video). After this presentation and a number of side conversation about diversity I really want to make sure that Sahana is doing everything we can to support an inclusive environment. Chamindra de Silva and Leslie Hawthorn are currently working to draft a code of conduct. Once again, if you’ve got other ideas, please leave a comment or send me an email (michael@sahanafoundation.org).