On a Wednesday morning in mid-2005, Mark Nichols and Bill Anderson, both then at Massey University’s Hokowhitu Campus, came up with the idea to create an ePortfolio platform in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
A little over a year later, after countless hours of research, analysis, interviews, and tossing various ideas around the project team, Penny Leach, then-developer at Catalyst, committed the first piece of code to the Mahara codebase on 27 September 2006 at the end of her work day at 16:50 with the unassuming commit message “Initial commit”. The Mahara project codebase became official. Fifteen years later, we are taking time out to celebrate the Mahara community around the world.