The Sai Students Portal: A Labour of Love

www.saistudents.org

The alumni community of the Sri Sathya Sai educational institutions is widely dispersed across India and the globe today. Alumni generations span over four decades, and it is no surprise that our lives reflect a vast diversity of occupational, life and philosophical interests.

Given the vast diversity and dispersed nature of the alumni community, the greatest challenge the community faces is one of communication and engagement. How can a globally dispersed community connect across time zones in a meaningful way? The Sai Students Portal is a high-end technology platform built to address this need.

Background and Purpose

Being an alumnus is a special part of any adult’s identity. Our formative years take us back to times when our minds were innocent, our personalities unpolished, and when we were unguarded by some of the walls we inevitably acquire as adults. We may have traveled far in time from when we were all students at Parthi, Brindavan or Ooty, and spread out across the globe. Our perspectives have matured and our world views have evolved. Even so, each of us is tied to the other in special ways because of our shared experiences with Bhagawan and at the campuses. Our student life was remarkably different from what we would have experienced at any other educational institution. Alumni of every university forever connect on tales and memories of ‘those years’. Our identity as Sai alumni is particularly special to us – our feelings for Bhagawan and our alma mater run remarkably deep. This depth of feelings is what the Sai Students Portal seeks to build on.

The portal is an open and honest attempt to answer the great challenge of communication, and specifically, to help answer a single question: How can the alumni be useful to each other, their alma mater, Sai organizations, and to society?

The Genesis

The portal is a fairly sophisticated social networking platform based on an award winning technology framework called ELGG. In its basic form, it shares key features of leading current social technology platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Illustrious adopters of the ELGG technology include the World Bank, UNESCO, NASA and universities such as Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Stanford.

However, an immense amount of work had to go behind tooling the basic ELGG platform to suit the unique needs of the Sai alumni community.

Even before choosing the technology, there was a dream. A group of like-minded alumni joined hands in 2007 to envision what it would take to connect the alumni community in meaningful and purposeful ways. They framed the issue broadly and gathered lessons learnt from similar efforts earlier. Pivotal to the dream was the belief that as a community we care deeply and genuinely about making a difference to the world around us. That our lives will sum up to ‘giving back’ to society, instead of ‘extracting’ something for ourselves. That we delight more in the joy of sharing than in the comfort of receiving. And that each alumnus would like to stand up and be counted against the fulfillment of this aim, irrespective of outcomes and impact. With such inspiration within, the team still had to negotiate through the issues of creating a practical solution that delivered.

The Subtle Hand

How a volunteer group of alumni working on this project came to choose ELGG from a plethora of technology choices is a unique story in itself. A lot of the early discussion and debate about technology choices led to stalemates and dead-ends. Each member knew that choosing the right technology platform would be pivotal to the eventual success of the project. The platform had to be versatile and flexible while being stable and predictable. Eventually, the discussion converged toward the choice of a technology called .NET nuke.

Slowly a sense of hubris started to set in, when one day the junior most alumnus on the team came out from the blue and suggested the use of ELGG. This was a huge surprise since he had chosen not play a thought leader’s role in the team till then. The technical leads in the team explored the option and were quite surprised to discover how well this technology suited the overall objectives of the project. The choice was quickly finalized and work commenced in earnest. Many months after the launch of the portal, this junior alumnus shared the inspiration for his proposal.
During a similar struggle (choice between .Net and other platforms), Bhagawan appeared to him in a dream and said, “Enthuku bada padutunnavu, PHP undhi kada?” (PHP is an open source general-purpose scripting language originally designed for Web development to produce dynamic Web pages.) He asked Bhagawan how to convince the others in the team about PHP. Bhagawan replied with His charming smile, “PHP is Pure Heart Philosophy and that is Sai Philosophy. Use that for My site”. This alumnus discovered ELGG runs on the PHP interpreted scripting language. With Bhagawan’s clear directive in mind, he confidently proposed the use of the ELGG framework.

Bhagawan inaugurated the portal formally on 1st Jan, 2010. Since then, there hasn’t been any looking back!

The Journey and the Road Ahead

Building the portal hasn’t been easy. The portal project has run for nearly six years and has absorbed more than forty thousand man hours so far. Many hands, minds and hearts joined in the build –  one brick at a time – despite being spread across multiple time zones, batches and professions. Today, more than twenty thousand lines of programming code hum silently in the background, powering the portal 24X7. The journey goes on…

The goal is to make the portal the primary communication hub for the global Sai alumni community. The portal provides a fail-safe process to authenticate alumni from any batch and provides each member with a slew of personalized communication tools. The portal’s contents are accessible only to its registered members. So far, 2,502 members have shared 1,330 discussions and experiences, 4,559 photographs and 691 videos/links with each other. It already houses an incredibly rich repository of memories, experiences and conversations for members to participate in. It serves as the single communication source that can reach out to all registered members instantly. Between individual notifications and mass emails, the portal has seen traffic of over 2,52,000 emails till date to its members.

While the numbers seem large, there is much to be done to generate real engagement among alumni on the portal. This is because many alumni already use other tools and platforms to stay in touch with their batch mates and friends, and are yet to make the portal a regular part of their life. To address this, the volunteer team working on this project plans to take the portal to new heights. Some of the exciting features in plan are a Web conferencing module, superior integration of the portal with email inboxes, enhanced content classification and design along with many other features. All these new features will address many of the challenges in coordinating seva initiatives, thus making the portal experience truly unique and enriching for all alumni.

Keeping Grounded

At its core, the portal is a labour of love. Its charter therefore centers this offering of love with certain principles to guide day-to-day operations.

The eventual success of the portal rests on the belief that when Sai alumni are connected to each other on a flexible platform, such as the portal, they will discover wonderful ways, small and big, to tap into and harness each other’s goodness for meaningful endeavours.

While it’s been a wonderful journey for the last six years, the voyage ahead promises to be even more exciting. The portal can be a great tool to aid in fulfilling the convocation oath we took all those years ago during our respective convocations.

“I hereby solemnly declare and promise that I will, in my daily life and conversation and in thought, word and deed, conduct myself as befits a member of Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning; That I will, to the utmost of my capacity and opportunity, support the cause of sound learning, humanity, morality and Spirituality; and that, as far as lies in me, I shall uphold and advance the social and, indeed all round welfare of my countrymen and fellow men.”