avasthana

Avasthana (अवस्थान) is the start of a new portal which is all about climate. It is an OpenSource project and is released under the Apache 2.0 OpenSource license.

Introduction

First of all you may ask why everything is written in English? The answer is twofold:

• Developers tend to document everything in English
• The portal shall be international

At this point of time I plan to start with the languages English and German.

Basic idea behind it

The topic climate, climate-change, climate-catastrophe and all related things like discussions, knowledge, activism, information and so forth occupied me for around two years now. There are many websites one can gather information but I see a missing portal with combined, high quality and moderated information for different sections in the are climate. Here is a first draft for the contents:

What means Avasthana

While reading The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson I stumbled about the word Avasthana in the following paragraph:

"But not in India. Elections were held and the nationalist nativist BJP party was thrown out of office as insufficient to the task, and partly responsible for the disaster, having sold the country to outside interests and burned coal and trashed the landscape in the pursuit of ever growing inequality. The RSS disgraced and discredited at last as an evil force in Indian life. A new party was voted in, a composite party composed of all kinds of Indians, every religion and caste, urban poor, rural poor, the educated, all banded together by the disaster and determined to make something change. The ruling elite lost legitimacy and hegemony, and the inchoate fractured resistance of victims coalesced in a party called Avasthana, Sanskrit for survival. The world's biggest democracy, taking a new way. India's electrical power companies were nationalized where they weren't already, and a vast force was put to work shutting down coal-fired power plants and building wind and solar plants, and free-river hydro, and non-battery electrical storage systems to supplement the growing power of battery storage. All kinds of things began to change. Efforts were renewed to dismantle the worst effects of the caste system -- these efforts had been made before, but now it was made a national priority, the new reality, and enough Indians were now ready to work for it. All over India, governments at all levels began to implement these changes."

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future , page 25, Orbit, 2020

Other translations can be found at this Sanskrit Dictionary.

Development

The application will be written in Ruby on Rails with the focus to create it as simple as possible. That also means, that it will not be a API based application for the portal because Rails offers everything for a modern website (see: Hotwire). This will bring the freedom to work with the highest priority and focus to important functionalities:

• User and Role-Management
• Moderation
• Fulltext-Search for all sections
• High level of automation
• Highest performance possible
• Extendability
• Highest level of security for the users and the data
• API's for upcoming services
• Integration of valuable services