ARGUS
Watch one place on a map · open source
Free software for one place you care about. Put reports on a map, grade which ones to trust, and leave with a short, sourced brief. Not a news feed, and not a chatbot making things up.
Free tools for making sense of a complex world.
Shama Research builds free, open-source software that helps you organize information and think clearly. Three tools so far — one for world events, one for research journals, one for writing them up.
Independent and non-commercial.
Products
WJM
Wisdom Journal Manager · open source
Free software for running a small academic journal on WordPress. Writers submit their papers on a public page, editors review them in one inbox, and you publish. Built for campus journals, student magazines, and small society titles. Payments and DOIs stay optional.
About · Guide · Tour · Loop · Limits · WordPress.org · GitHub
Shama Writer
Local-first research writing · open source
Free software for writing research papers in the browser. Gather sources, map arguments, structure chapters, and typeset with Typst — all saved locally on your device. No account, no server, works offline once loaded.
Research
We share research here while it is still in progress. Papers and prototypes rather than finished software.
Don't Fund Winners
Additionality-based capital allocation · working paper + prototype engine
A fairer way for a small lending circle to decide who gets a loan. Instead of picking the applicant most likely to succeed, it picks the one the loan actually changes, and it publishes every decision. A paper re-analyses a real microcredit trial; a Python engine runs a full loan cycle. So far it runs on test data.
About
Shama Research builds and maintains software for three jobs: watching world events (ARGUS), running research journals (WJM), and writing research papers (Shama Writer).
All three do the same thing at heart. They take a pile of raw information and organize it into something you can actually work with — and every claim links back to its source, so anyone can check it rather than take your word for it.
Everything is free. We are independent and non-commercial — not a registered nonprofit, and not a startup chasing launches. We build these slowly and carefully, as long-term tools, not products to sell.
Origin
Named for a light.
Shama means lamp, a light to see by. The work does what a lamp does, making it a little easier to see in a complex world.
It is also the name of Maaz Ahmad's mother, Shama Yasmin. The studio is named for her.
Maaz Ahmad, founder. Zachary Adam, cofounder.