May 13, 2008, Colombo:
The Sahana Messaging and Alerting Module, which recently received a major face lift (well, more than a face lift: actually and overall lift ) courtesy of Respere, was presented at the LirneASIA colloquium for Disaster Management and Messaging. With an attentive audience, the colloquium was a success, and we managed to gather a lot of valuable feedback for the evolution of the module.

The Sahana Messaging and Alerting Module (acronym: SMAM) is a Sahana module that concentrates on sending messages to end users. There has been a lot of discussion on the Sahana lists and elsewhere regarding the efficiency of short/text messages during times of a disaster, and its ability to somewhat withstand the issue of messages not getting through due to network congestion problems during disasters: which is exactly why we concentrated on SMS as the primary mesaging medium for sending messages. However, having other media such as the implemented EMail functionality, and future implementations such as MMS and IM for messaging is important as well: in a period where messages reaching its recipients is doubtful, I guess duplicating the effort through various media might ensure that at least some messages get through.

I guess there are four defining characteristics of the SMAM.
1. Free/Open Source Software solution: The solution is F/OSS: thus with its transparency and large user development community, the module would definitely be improved and evolved by many developers. Even as we speak, there is a Google Summer of Code project to improve the module and build in newer features.

2. Tight integration with Sahana: The module is part of the Sahana Disaster Management System, which in turn means many benefits. Sahana consists of a large community consisting of end users, practitioners, developers, technical specialists, domain experts, researchers, academics and the like: all of whom could provide many valuable contributions to the module as a whole. Secondly, a live deployment of Sahana is bound to contain a rich dataset of valuable disaster related information. The SMAM can make use of this information in its operation: say, it has the ability to send out alerts to all people living within 100m of the coastline, making use of the People’s registries and GIS. Or possibly messages to all volunteers working in X and Y regions under Z sectors: the data being provided by the Organization Registry and the Volunteer Managment Module. Thus the possibilities are endless, and Sahana has the modules that could prove this to be a very useful aspect of an alerting system.

3. The solution is web based: is this good? Of course it is - this means that accessibility to the system is quite flexible: the system can be accessed over the Intranet or the Internet, depending on how you set it up: and consisting of the Sahana Access Control procedures, access can be controlled quite well. On the other hand, the system can be run as a standalone system as well: giving the best of both worlds

4. Finally, we built in a ‘plugin architecture’ for the messaging module. This, inspired the by the work done on the Sahana GIS stuff, allows the developer to plug in various plugins to achieve the required functionality. In the SMAM, the SMS Gateway is built in such a way: we’ve tested the system by plugging in Kannel and SMSTools as the SMS Gateways: this is quite useful, since both Kannel and SMSTools works in distinct ways and have their distinct advantages: which makes a lot sense depending on how the system is hosted, and what permissions the system has. A plugin architecture allows the developer to write interface code that will ensure that the gateway works with Sahana: and thus, any gateway can be plugged in.

More of this to come soon: I just gave a technical overview in this post.

Related Posts:
ICT4Peace - Sanjana Hathoduwa
LBO - Rohan Samarajeewa

Following the devastation of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, the usual questions arise: how, why and where can ICT help.. Although this time round, the situation is a bit more complicated. However, the global humanitarian community is rising to the challenge as well. An instance of Sahana has been setup, with the help of InSTEDD. Another Sahana instance is hosted at Relief.Asia : Currently, efforts are underway to localize the system into Burmese. Also looking quite promising are the efforts with the Thuraya mobile devices. Coordinates from the device’s in-built GPS receiver can be text messaged via SMS to a service which can then be used in collaboration with GIS. This is exactly what’s on the roadmap for Sahana; which contains both the SMS backend and the GIS backend/front-end, which leaves a small component to be developed to parse coordinates, and then act on it - maybe send out emails, display them on maps, show them in the Sahana Situation Mapping Module etc. Anyways, to the topic at hand: now that Sahana is setup, it would be interesting to see how the other technologies work around it. Challenging deployments add to the experience, and one day, maybe a total solution would be readily available. GeoChat and Twitter seem to be hot on the charts as well - a ready made case for social networking, and the future semantic web..

More articles from Paul Currion, Eduardo Jezierski…