What Our Volunteers Say
I volunteered on the LSF Elections project, starting with the presidential Election in 2019. I’ve since worked on all of the online reports used by the Election Commission leadership for the presidential, parliamentary, and provincial Council elections. I also participated in several mock elections, which were done as a part of system testing, during which I learned a lot about user experience. I really enjoyed our late-night hackathon sessions at LSF. They never made us volunteers feel like we are outsiders. I met some awesome people who I'm happy to call my friends. It feels great to be part of this team and give something back to our country.
Sarani Mendis
I got involved with LSF as a volunteer back in 2019 for the election project. I initially thought it would be a one-off engagement. But instead, it opened the door to countless opportunities in my career. I was in charge of setting up processes to handle the entire deployment side of the election system and I was fortunate enough to work side-by-side with Dr. Sanjiva.
It was a huge opportunity for me and I learned a lot from the entire experience. As for the perks, LSF provided really good food during the volunteer days, which in turn made me gain a few pounds (maybe this is a con?) All in all, my volunteer opportunity turned out to be one of the greatest highlights in my career and helped me gain experience and bragging rights. It was great to be able to make friends with other awesome, and similar-minded people in the volunteer pool.
Nilesh Jayanandana
It's a privilege to have had the chance to contribute to a project of national importance. The team (both technical and non-technical - although I didn't interact with them directly) were energetic and positive which I think is a major driving factor in successfully implementing the project on the ground. It is my pleasure to have shared my knowledge and learn from such a capable technical team consisting of both LSF in house and volunteer individuals. I am happy to see the project shaping up and continue to grow.
Kalpa Welivitigoda
A couple of years back, I got the opportunity to volunteer with the LSF. I worked on the incident management system for the Election Commission. The project was quite interesting for me for 2 reasons. First, being able to help create systems that would eventually power up the country. Second, the opportunity to contribute to an open source system at its incubation level.
The overall project spanned around 6 months, in which we built (and re-built) systems. LSF took care of us during what felt like a very long hackathon! The overall system architectures were designed by the industry best, so as a tech head, the implementation process was enjoyable. Personally, I managed to pick up a lot of public commits to my Github, which looks good in green now! The tech we developed also helped me understand the systems I work on in my professional life as well.
Manujith Pallewatte
I found volunteering with the Lanka Software Foundation to be an extremely rewarding experience. Working on the Code for Sri Lanka Elections project, I had the opportunity to directly apply my knowledge and experience on a project that is of importance to the country, while also expanding my knowledge.
It was also a pleasure getting to know and working with the talented and supportive team that enabled completing tasks efficiently and made the entire experience memorable, despite working remotely for the most part.
Maryam Ziyad
Volunteering with LSF is one of the great experiences in my career. LSF provides solutions for the country's use-cases and has tech giants as mentors to overlook their projects. I could contribute twice to the election systems of the Election Commission of Srilanka and learned many new things which was a good source to understand the complex systems practically. In fact the experience in the live environment [of a national-level election] is unforgettable. The LSF team was very friendly to work with and treated me like their own member. Therefore this is a good opportunity to learn, to expand your community and to contribute to the projects helping Sri Lanka, which is remarkable.
Chamil Elladeniya
I initially joined to volunteer the Incident Management System which was being developed by LSF back in 2020. It gave me an opportunity to come back and work with the Election Commission to build the capacity of their engineering team through Python Developer Training workshops (Flask and Django). Our workshops were held entirely remotely, but were interactive!. Being a guy who barely moved out of my seat, I was more than happy to share my knowledge on what I love doing. Overall, I got opportunities to interact with some of the developers who volunteer and contribute to projects in, and for the benefit of Sri lanka which has been quite satisfying.
