Why I Code For Sri Lanka

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Dinuka de Silva, former LSF Fellow

At LSF, I was part of the team that envisioned the future of digital infrastructure in the Sri Lankan government sector. We focused on areas that would have the greatest degree of impact. One of those areas was elections, with over 16 million registered voters. We looked at areas such as ballot counting, calculations, results aggregation and results distribution. All of these areas were time consuming and prone to human error. Together with the elections team and over 70 volunteers based locally and around the world, we developed software to make these areas more efficient and accurate, in a very short period of time. We’ve now had two successful election runs (Presidential Elections 2019 and Parliament Election 2020) and continue to support the Election Commission as they evolve the systems for future elections.

Dinuka is currently doing his Masters at Indiana University, and is serving as a Research Assistant at the Cyber Infrastructure Research Center.

With one year’s experience as a software engineer, I joined LSF to expand my knowledge of new technologies and improve my skills through challenging work. Suddenly, I found myself tackling multiple national-level projects and collaborating with leading and renowned experts in the field. My first projects included implementing the General Information Graph project (GIG) and National Passenger Service project. I then moved on to contribute to the Incident Management System and Results Tabulation System for the Elections Commission of Sri Lanka. There was always action, engagement, and motivation within the team and with our supportive volunteer contributors”

Umayanga is a SSE at Lanka Data Foundation, leading efforts to make 100% of Sri Lanka’s public data digitized, efficiently processible, and accessible so Sri Lankans can make meaningful use of it.

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Umayanga Gunawardhana, former LSF Fellow