History, Mission and Vision
The DISH Project is dedicated to the memory of Shri Gangadharan Kurup and Smt. K. Thankamma Kurup.
The DISH Project traces its history back to 2021, when one of the family members got tired of paying for Google One, OneDrive and other cloud subscriptions and bought a NAS. This catapulted the desire to self-host within the Devi Nivas Family.
As time passed, another member had enough of Windows and finally ditched it in favor of Linux. This led to him getting a thorough understanding of and familiarity with UNIX. Using these newfound skills and some old hardware, the Devi Nivas Cloud Services project was born in 2024 with the goal of creating a network of services that could replace the costly mainstream equivalent. To formalize the management of the DCS network, the Department of Information Technology was established to oversee the development, maintenance and management of the network. DIT pitched DCS to family members in an informal meeting, thus allowing its continued development. This was the first Annual Stakeholders' Meeting.
In 2025, the domain devinivas.org was purchased. This marked the beginning of the Data Independence and Self-Hosting Project. DISH was created with the goal of creating an integrated digital ecosystem for the Devi Nivas family while ensuring all members' data stayed within family property. DISH superseded DCS.
By December 2025, DIT obtained reliable and powerful hardware and was able to expand its service offering, with its first public on-premises web service being GitLab.
Circa early 2026, DIT decided to let DISH members (users of the DISH network) make decisions related to the development and finances of the network through midterm surveys. In the process, DIT was renamed to the Division of Information Technology by the members.
As of Oct 2026, DISH now has 15+ users and runs small-business scaled infrastructure with services encompassing a plethora of the family's digital lives.
Mission
DISH aims to create a suite of services that cater to the family's use cases, while keeping security, privacy and reliability as its top three priorities. The infrastructure used by DISH shall remain on family property to the fullest extent possible.
Vision
DISH aims to prove that every family can own their data irrespective of their technical background. It aims to lead by example.
The roots of DISH are strong and deep. Despite our limited resources, we remain committed to offering an integrated ecosystem of products that can be compared to Google One or Microsoft 365. This is no easy task and will take years to achieve. We anticipate DISH being "stable", i.e. having enough services to cover the broad range of use-cases the family has, by 2030.