Sputnik's background story is perhaps a bit stranger than that of many other open source projects. To make it simpler, I (Yuri, the author of most of Sputnik) will write it in the first person.

I am from Vladivostok,Affordable Dissertation Russia, was educated in US, worked in California for a few years in the software industry, then started a Ph.D. program at UC Berkeley School of Information. I was looking for a research project in the field at the intersection of information studies Write My Essay For Me, sociology of knowledge and sociology of technology, with some sort of international twist, so in 2005 I went to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to do interviews with Brazilian software developments to understand their take on things. In late February of 2007 I went back to Rio to do another round of interviews and a bit of participant observation, this time focusing on small number of software projects based in Brazil. I started by looking closer at Lua and Kepler, which is a project (also based in Rio) dedicated to developing a web platform based on Lua. In case of Kepler, I decided to "put my hands on the dough" as Brazilians say. I started by helping with documentation. André Carregal, the leader of Kepler, soon decided, however, that we should use a wiki to manage the documentation. There was no wiki written in Lua/Kepler written at the time, so we looked at a few standard options, finding each lacking for one reason or another. I eventually lost patience and decided to try writing a simple wiki in Kepler.

So, on a Saturday afternoon in early April I sat down and some hours later the first version of the wiki was ready. Since the Brazilians about me emphasized my being Russian so much, I called it "Sputnik." That was my first experience programming in Lua, so it came out a bit ugly, but it did run, and after a few bug fixes, we started using it as a wiki for the Kepler project, and it was surprisingly well received. One of the nice things about working in a relatively small community is that you get noticed. I doubt anyone would pay attention to yet another wiki written in Python, but a wiki written in Lua brought it some attention early on, more than I expected. As a result, I almost immediately started a major refactoring effort, spending more time than I care to admit since April. I did manage to find time in between my hacking session to collect data for my dissertation, but let's say that my "participant observation" ended up being a lot more participant than is normal in ethnography. (I am currently working on a methodological paper about participant observation and will post a link here later.)

The later iterations of Sputnik benefitted tremendously from discussions with André (oh, the joys of face-to-face conversation) as well as contributions from other people, some "local" at Rio, others remote. Some submitted patches, others sent ideas, others reported bugs. (See Credits for a partial list of names.)

In August 2007 I returned to the United States, to be able to focus on my writing my dissertation, which is now my "day job." I do end up spending a good amount of time on Sputnik, which have forced me to hand off to someone else another project I used to lead.