27 September 2026, 19:12

Kia ora,

Today in history: 20 years ago, on 27 September 2006, Penny Leach pushed the first lines of code to the Mahara codebase. Several months of hard work of the initial project team led to this point, including a pivot away from building on another open source project and starting fresh instead.

20 years on, Mahara still exists to support learner reflection and growth. We design every feature around that goal, giving learners space to document and reflect on their own learning and express themselves.

Many thanks to all contributors to the project, be that visionaries, students, educators, learning designers, business analysts, usability experts, visual designers, developers, translators, system administrators and other technical staff, peer reviewers, testers, accessibility experts, translators, info sec researchers, financial sponsors, support staff, and the Directors at Catalyst who built a team around the software that operates to this day.

Celebrate this milestone with us in our upcoming events, including Mahara Hui Online on 15 October 2026. We'll look back at the beginning of the project with Mark Brown and look ahead to what comes next.

Have a great week

Kristina