The following image describes the current SAHANA user requirements for Inventory Management Module

First cut of the Sahana SITREP (Situation Report) was done and early version of the module is available for review purposes now. There were quite a bit of interest for this functionality in Sahana for sometime, but there wasn’t a module that really address the requirement. Sahana Situation Awareness module gives similar features but that’s not exactly situation report, it’s rather situation maps.

Somehow Gavin managed to compile a nice requirement document for SitRep and since I have seen the real use of situation reports during the Sahana deployment in Sidr disaster in 2007, immediately realized the importance of the module and thought that I should give a try.

So after couple of months, I managed to finished up some of the base functionality of the module based on Gavin’s requirement document and thought that it should be reviewed before I move forward. This phase of the SitRep module consist with following features,

• Create new reports.
• View all available reports:
  • Select and view individual report - summary, development, action, key-figures
  • Select and update individual report - summary, development, action, key-figures

• Easy edit via FCKEditor or TinyMCE
• Track and Provide details of last updated user and date/time

And following is the list of TODO features,

I had the privilege of contributing to TacticalTech’s recently released Maps for Advocacy: An Introduction to Geographical Mapping Techniques. This book is very informative and nicely edited, and gives an overview of mapping techniques to a new user. Good work TTC, for this wonderful piece of work. A must read for everyone.

The idea that good things can come from terrible events is not particularly accurate, but it’s true that the Sahana community that has grown since the Indian Ocean tsunami is a remarkable thing. In his conference article Does it take a disaster to understand the power of open development?, Ross Gardler discusses Shahani Weerawarana’s presentation on Sahana.

Developing an Open Source application with the contribution of many individuals over the internet is no easy task due to the challenges in communication. Creating a database schema that can be used by contributors physically apart and developing on different modules is no simple task either.

New data requirements need to be added to the data model with a thorough understanding about the dependencies that exist to this new data. Most of the time, the new data needed already exists in the database in different formats, therefore the existing data model should be carefully analyzed before making change.

Below is a entity relationship diagram of Sahana that can be used to visually understand about the Sahana database structure.

The Entity Relationship diagram for Sahana revision 1.79.2.4

First thing to notice in the database is that, there are tables with and without relationships defined. The lack of relationships can make it harder for new contributors of Sahana to learn about the database structure, making it harder to make improvements in the existing modules. Another importance for the need of relationships is to ensure database consistency.

Ones all the relationships are defined, it should be possible to explore if any improvements to the database can be done.

The following link provides a SAHANA use case diagram based on an actual post disaster scenario.

http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php?id=req:user_case_diagrams

I’ll be creating more updated versions as requirements and functionalities change.

And it begins - a brand new F/OSS project: a Human Rights Case Management System, based on Sahana. OpenEvsys, coined from Open Events System, is a tool to manage human rights cases - it is based on the HURIDOCS set of standards and methodologies, collectively known as the Events Standard Format.

Respere, the company specializing in Sahana services, won the project in response to an open RFP from HURIDOCS, with its solution based on and reusing Sahana - more specifically the underlying Sahana Application Framework. The teams at Respere and HURIDOCS and the community at large, are excited at this partnership - there is a lot of anticipated collaboration between the Sahana project/community and the OpenEvsys project and its upcoming community. This is bound to be a win-win scenario for both projects as well.

OpenEvsys stands for the Open Events System - the system will be web-based, and will make use of an improved version of the Sahana Application Framework to provide base framework level functionality - and of course, the improvements would find its way into the Sahana project as well. The system would adhere to various standards, and will consist of simple but highly intuitive User Interfaces to cater to field workers. Like its underlying sibling, it would be LAMP based - built on PHP and AJAX, with database abstraction, and running atop the Apache2 Web Server.

The system is inspired by WinEvsys - a desktop based system implementing the same model, and which has been used in the past. WinEvsys was used by HURIDOCS and partners for some time now - WinEvsys is now making way for OpenEvsys, which would introduce multi-user usage and collaboration between systems, alongside many other improvements. Hats off to WinEvsys, for its service thus far.

A key difference we see between OpenEvsys and Sahana is the longevity of the system - whilst Sahana has been used for shorter durations and is expected to do so, an OpenEvsys instance is expected to run for 20 years or more - thus a lot of detail would have to go into building a highly stable system - and at the same time efficiently handle the changes in platform etc.

We have currently completed requirements gathering for the project - pretty soon, all the infrastructure would be setup for the project to launch itself into cyberspace.

The GIS component(s) of Sahana, coined as SahanaGIS for ease of use, were presented and showcased at FOSS4G 2008, the Free/Open Source Geospatial Conference, held in Cape Town, South Africa, from the 29th September to the 4th October 2008. The Sahana GIS team was represented by Fran Boon and Mifan Careem (yours truly ) . FOSS4G was the perfect platform to talk about the GIS work in Sahana - there was a lot of appreciation for SahanaGIS, and lots of valuable comments as well, from the Gurus of the FOSS GIS world. The SahanaGIS publicity was a 3-pronged attack - A general presentation titled “Integrating GIS into a FOSS Disaster Management System“, an academic research paper “SahanaGIS: a rapid deployment framework for humanitarian relief operations“, authored by David Bitner, Fran Boon, Mifan Careem and Gavin Threadgold, and a SahanaGIS demonstration. This was also the first time Sahana’s offline GIS capability was showcased, with the use of UMN/Mapserver and OpenLayers.

We had a Sahana localization sprint session organized in India and over the IRC, for contributors from other parts, on 1st November 2008 from 11 AM to 6 PM. It was exciting to see people turning out on time and eventually participating with some sheer amount of discussions going on in #sahana, the project’s official IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.

The main agenda was to increase the localization statistics, ensuring quality of translations at the same time, of Hindi and other Indic languages. And we ended up adding on contributions to *Hindi* and *Bengali*.

Bangla contribution was kicked off this day with 3 people contributing namely:

[name - country/team - IRC nickname]:

• Arindam Ghosh - India - makghosh/arindam
• Mahay Alam Khan - Bangladesh - maktrix
• Subhodip Biswas - India - subhodip

They were able to take up the statistics to 6% on the day for both bn and bn_IN. And at the end of the day we got some good news as well! Mayah Alam Khan got the news that he is going to be a father! after the session. We wish him and his wife a hearty congratulations on this beautiful news on the sprint day!

All of them started working on bn_IN first and we merged the same files to bn_BD which would later be modified as per the Bangladesh locale.

For Hindi we had the following people, including me [ajuonline] , working:

[name - country/team - IRC nickname]:

• Rajesh Ranjan - India - Rajesh_Ranjan
• Nandeep Maali - India - n9986 *
• Jeba Singh Emmanuel - India - graydot *

The final statistics for Hindi was taken to 86% from the earlier 82% with some quality check done by installing Sahana with the Hindi language pack and browsing through.

* While the internet at the venue stopped working as soon as we started because of the server problem which couldnt be fixed by the end, the 3 people at the venue, me, Nandeep & Jeba were not able to key in any translations.

I ran off the Internet using my cellphone’s GPRS connection and did the review while Rajesh worked on the files. I would like to specifically mention that the earlier status of 82% was a result of significant contributions from all of us Just that this particular day we could not do much.

We had visitors to the channel from the Indian community to check out and talk to us and also talk to others about the activity going on. We had a Gujarati language translator, Kartik Mistry [India - kart_ ], sign up on this day too. So we hope to get Gujarati translations taken care of soon!

Special Thanks to:

• Gora Mohanty of Sarai, New Delhi and a prominent face of the FOSS world in India, for hosting us and help spread the Sahana message.
• Dominic König - Our translation server admin,  Sahana PMC member and a friend :), for being present there to assist with issues, instructions and to guide us. He was up at 7 AM in the morning, as per his time zone, for the event!! Thank you Dominic, I must say you rock!
• The contributors working on the translation, all who are in someway or the other are active FOSS contributors.
• People who helped spread the message about Sahana translation to the mailing lists and IRC channels in the Indian community, especially from ##linux-india.

The communication channels used were the mailing lists and IRC Channel. The log of the threads and chat specific to this event can be found here:

• IRC Logs - Part 1 and Part 2 [ The conversation started at "21:03:12" as per the Part 1 log file. Do a CTRL+F of 21:03:12 to reach there. ]
• Sahana Localization Mailing List - Part 1 and Part 2.

Conducting such an activity did help spread awareness about “What Sahana is?” and “Localization Needs of Sahana” in the Indian community for sure apart from kickstarting the Indic localization activities, and we have been receiving comments on people talking about Sahana in India and willing to contribute. So I am looking forward to have more contributions from India to this noble project.
Sahana is a useful piece of software and translations of it in various Indian languages is still something to be completed. So in case you are willing to contribute to it, do join in the project mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/sahana-localization and help translate Sahana!

Report by Dominic König : http://edrs.nursix.org/?p=31