Completed Milestone 2 for Rajdhani (Asha for Education)

We officially completed Milestone 2 of Rajdhani project at “Asha for Education”. The alpha site is up and running here. We started off with the following team charter :-

 

1. Database access to Chapters
2. updating the main pages http://ashanet.org
3. Building In house application for programs such as SAC (Support A Child)
4. Helping Chapters setup donation channels for Events
5. Installing commonly used application such as this wiki
6. Protecting the site from hackers and rogue scripts
7. Access to youtube channel http://youtube.com/ashaforeducation

And the following email says where we stand. Long way to go… as they say : Don’t concentrate on your goal so much that you don’t enjoy the journey !!

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As we all go about looking at the enormity of the task ahead, sometimes, it helps to look back and see how far we have come. Here is one such moment. Congratulations to us on the fantastic job we have done closing Milestone #2. It has laid the foundation for the work we are about to do.

Here are some things we did that I remember do let us applaud ourselves for all the effort.
1. We set up an SVN. For all these years, Asha has been operating without any source code control. It is virtually impossible to do collaborative work without this infrastructure. We finally have it in place and have actually been able to do distributed work. Without this, source code can and has gotten lost in the past.
2. Learned to work without meeting each other. This might seem like a small deal now. But in the early days, it was impossible to relate to people in a completely different part of the country (even world ). We had no idea how we would ever go through with the complicated technical discussions that seem impossible without face time. But with the conf call, the web-dev group, TeamViewer and the wiki, we have built a foundation for the future. We will really be able to harness talent from anywhere in the world because of the foundation we have been able to build.
3. We added JIRA task tracking system that we actually use - that is not vulnerable to attacks.  http://support.ashanet.org
4. We have created a wiki system that will scale across all chapters in the world.   http://wiki.ashanet.org
6. We brought down our setup time down from 6 months to a couple of weeks.

7. We stayed together as a team - through a heck of a lot of differences rough patches in all our lives.
8. We built a foundation for the website with a lot of the core controllers in place.
   - User Management
   - Donations
   - Meeting Minutes
   - Articles
9. We reduced the maintenance time on the webmaster's alias considerably so we can all have more time for development.

10. We have also serviced existing php code, social networks including - facebook & youtube.

It has been a tough year and a half. This is an acknowledgement and a small tribute to our journey so far.