I'm working on a collaboration tool built to help government agencies and aid organizations coordinate during emergencies. I helped start it this summer as part of the Humanitarian FOSS Project (hfoss.org).
It was used successfully in beta for Thanksgiving-day feeding coordination and we're getting very close to our first non-beta release.
It's related, yes. Both are classified as "Humanitarian FOSS Projects" and Sahana has been worked on in previous years by people participating in the HFOSS Project summer internship, which is where we started Collabbit.
I'm not intimately familiar with Sahana, but from what I understand it's a fairly large system and can do a lot of specific things. Consequently, most of its deployments have been at sites of major disasters or for very large agencies.
Collabbit takes a different approach. Our goal is to facilitate communication inside groups and between groups, rather than to provide a means of accomplishing specific tasks. That means that Collabbit is quite simple and broad right now. While our initial use case was volunteer organizations communicating in New York City, we're hoping it can be a valuable tool for smaller groups as well.
It was used successfully in beta for Thanksgiving-day feeding coordination and we're getting very close to our first non-beta release.
http://collabbit.org http://github.com/elitheeli/collabbit
If you'd like a look around the demo or are interested in contributing leave a comment or send me an email.