Sahana Software Foundation Haiti Earthquake Response Status Report #2 January 19, 2010 04:00 UTC

Work on the Haiti 2010 Sahana Disaster Response Portal continues around the clock.  The following is a brief update of what we’ve accomplished and where we are headed.  Most of this information is currently maintained on a status page on our wiki at http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php/haiti:status

The Haiti 2010 Sahana Disaster Response Portal at http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org currently has the following capabilities:

Current Capabilities:

Organization Registry:  http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org/prod/or/organisation

Provides a searchable database of organizations responding to the disaster, the sector where they are providing services, their office locations, activities and their contact details.  This is becoming the primary repository of organization, office and contact information for the relief operation.  We have volunteers to enter all available known sources of contact information from organizations working in Haiti, including: OCHA data of aid organizations working in Haiti; the Inter-Action agency Haiti Earthquake crisis list; other lists collected by aid organizations and other sources (whatever we can get our hands on - we will scrub it and try to validate it and get it into Sahana).

Status as of 19 January 2010 at 04:00 UTC

• Number of organizations registered: 175
• Number of offices registered: 55
• Number of contacts registered: 139

Update: We received today a current contact list of organizations working in Haiti from UN OCHA in Port au Prince.  We are getting this data into Sahana as soon as possible.

Persons Registry: http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org/prod/pr/index

The Persons Registry serves as the main repository of all person-specific contact information for organization staff - linked to the organization registry.

We support and promote the entry of missing and found persons information on the main google site for aggregating this information (at http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/). There is a widget on our homepage such that entry into this site can be done directly.

As needed, we will be sync-ing the missing persons registry within Sahana with the google list for use in other applications, such as the DVI (see below).

Situation Mapping: http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org/prod/gis/index

Provides an integrated annotated map of what is happening in Haiti right now. We are pulling maps and events from multiple sources current incidents shown against the latest high resolution satellite imagery & rapidly-updating OpenStreetMap layers. Sources of data include:

• Base layers:
  • Open Street Maps current Haiti maps project (3 options for graphic style and amount of detail)
  • Digital Globe Hi-Resolution Imagery (2010-1-14)
  • Ikonos Imagery (2010-1-15,2010-1-17)
  • Google Maps (Terrain, Hybrid, Satellite)
  • 1:12.5k Topo Maps for PaP
  • 1:50k Top Maps
• Data layers:
  • Sahana Organization Registry
  • Sahana Locations data (hospitals and medical facilities)
  • Ushahidi (haiti.ushahidi.com) Events
  • Shortcode 4636 SMS messages via Ushahidi
  • Open Street Map as an Overlay to be able to dislpay over imagery
  • Open Street Maps Points of Interest

Data Feeds:

We have feeds of all data collected by Sahana in the following formats:

• kml
• json
• xml
• xls
• csv
• georss
• gpx
• pfif (in place for missing persons data exchange with google)

A full list of available feeds is available on our status page.  Please visit http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php/haiti:status for a full list of feeds.

Request Management System: http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org/prod/rms/index

We have integrated with the 4636 project sponsored by the US State Department whereby persons within Haiti can send a free text SMS message to short code 4636 within Haiti with a request for assistance. These messages are translated and structured within Ushahidi and then pulled into Sahana’s Request Management System via a georss feed. Currently, we offer the ability for organizations to view and search a categorized list of categorized aid requests within Sahana. We are currently working on a system for organizations to claim requests for fulfillment and later to mark them as completed tasks.

NewsTicker: http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org

Live feed of latest news on Haiti earthquake response from UN agency and international non-governmental organization sources.

Other Available Capabilities:

Disaster Victims Identification Registry

Assists the management of fatalities and the identification of the deceased. Features Include:

• Reporting of body finds and management of recovery
• Tracking and Tracing of bodies
• Capturing of identification-relevant information
• Management of identification process

This system is available for an organization tasked with these responsibilities and will be secured from public access due to the sensitivity of the information (see Deployment Policy). Reconciled data with missing and found persons reports will be pushed back to the google registry of missing persons.

Capabilities and Modules in Development:

Request Management System - provides a simple bulletin-board style registry for organizations to make pledges of material assistance that can be matched with requests from the field. We are looking at providing a registry for organizations in the US with offers of in-kind assistance (computers, phones, generators, other equipment) can post the offers and can be matched with organizations working on the ground in Haiti with needs.

Volunteer Management System - provides a simple tool for an organisation to manage their volunteers.

Easy Install of a custom version - Portable version of Sahana which includes the tools above. Can run standalone or integrate with the central portal.

If you want to help: We are using the IRC #sahana channel on freenode as our main coordination tool.  Join the chat room to volunteer for tasks and someone from our core volunteer team will direct you - this room is actively staffed on a 24×7 basis.  We maintain a Sahana Haiti Deployment To Do List to track the items we need to work on.   Please volunteer to contribute and make a difference.

Go forth and do good.

Best regards, Mark

The Sahana Software Foundation and the Sahana community responded with a massive voluntary effort immediately following the earthquake that has devastated the poor country of Haiti.  Working around the clock, we have set up a hosted instance of Sahana (the first deployment of SahanaPy following a disaster!) on a public website that is already filling gaps in the information management requirements of the massive relief operation.

Major Accomplishments

We have a Haiti 2010 Sahana Disaster Response Portal - a live and active website up at http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org which contains a feeds from many of the relief agencies and links to Sahana modules that are actively being used to help coordinate the relief effort.

We have a Sahana Haiti wiki page where we are tracking all of our and others’ activites at: http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php/haiti:start

We have a requirements page where we record all the modification, configurations, and changes to Sahana based on the mission requirements at: http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php/haiti:requirements

The Haiti 2010 Sahana Disaster Response Portal provides the following functionality:

1. An Organization Registry - serves to track organizations and offices working on the ground in Haiti.  Organizations are encouraged to self-register and report their office locations - alternatively, individual organization office or lists of offices can be e-mailed to haiti-orgs@googlegroups.com and we have volunteers to assist with data entry and to aggregate lists from other sources.  We have entered data from pre-disaster lists of organizations working in Haiti available from UN OCHA.  We can assume that these organizations will be working on the relief efforts, but expect that most of their office locations will be different as most organizations have been forced to move into tents given that few buildings remain standing and usable in the capital.  We are working to validate these lists with the organizations directly.

   The site serves up both KML for Google Earth users and GeoRSS for everyone else, and will generate reports of organization activities and the gaps (uncovered sectors by geographic location).  This site will hopefully become the main resource for accurate information about the organizations working on the ground, where they are located, and what activities they are engaged in, and the resources in terms of staff and equipment that they have available to them.  (Currently, data is admittedly sparse but we expect more details to become available as the coordination efforts take root on the ground).  We are coordinating with UN OCHA, Google and others on sources of accurate lists and updates.

   What are the gaps in our information collection?  We have a large and we think accurate list of organizations, but not much office location information.  Without this, it becomes hard to generate data that can be used as a layer in a GIS system.  We are encouraging people to report this information - preferably by GPS coordinates, but any location information that we can use to manually geo-reference the office is valuable.  We hope to be able to enhance our capabilities such that we can produce polygons showing organization’s areas of coverage by sector.  Please direct organizations working in Haiti to our site to register their offices and activities!

2. A Missing Persons Registry / Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) Registry - we are working with Google and others on an agreed common standard for the exchange of Missings Persons data using the PFIF standard.  The Google site at http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/ is the main aggregator collecting all missing and found persons reports and we are encouraging all people to send data to that site.  [We are struggling a little as Google's feed is not fully PFIF compliant and the lack of unique record identifiers makes it more complex to set up true synchronization without the creation of duplicate records.  We continue to work with Google on this and hope to have a resolution and solution within the next few hours.]  We will also be embedding Google’s widget on our site for collecting missing person information.  Google will be making their data available via a PFIF feed and we will be importing it into Sahana’s Missing Persons registry.  From there, Sahana can add value to the simple lists being collected.
   In particular, Sahana’s Disaster Victims Identification registry - or DVI - which is used to management the handling and tracking and tracing of the deceased, dead bodies and their identification.  There is currently no other known application for this and we hope that those working in this area will find Sahana extremely valuable.  Sahana will have the ability to cross-reference missing persons information with the identified and unidentified deceased, thus facilitating reconciliation efforts.  The Sahana Missing Persons registry has additional physical description information fields and we hope to be able to utilize some of the image matching capabilities available to extend these capabilities further.  Organizations interested in utilizing these capabilities (which will not be made open for public use) should contact the Sahana team at sahana-haiti@lists.launchpad.net.

   Any updated missing persons status information will be pushed back to the main Google repository from Sahana.

3. Situation Mapping - Sahana’s site is able to map all of the geo-referenced data within Sahana - primarily the organization data, but we have also manually entered a data layer of hospitals and medical facilities.  Sahana has worked with members of the OSGeo community to obtain a fast tiled set of the current imagery being made available by Digital Globe. Sahana is also leveraging the constantly updated set of Open Street Map tiles.  These are acting as backdrop for the offices that are being entered as part of the Organization Registry.  Other data sources that are ready and available to be leveraged by Sahana and SahanaPy for other deployments include reports from Ushahidi, various point layers from Open Street Map, location names, USGS earthquakes, and locations from GeoNames.  We will continue to build out these capabilities further as relevant layers are made available.

Capabilities we are working on:
The following capabilities are in the process of being developed and we expect will soon be available:

• Request Management:  We are working with the US State Department, Ushahidi and some other voluntary efforts on a project to process SMS messages with requests for assistance sent from survivors in Haiti.  SMS text messages sent to a short code in Haiti will go into Ushahidi, who will have volunteer translators to add some structure to the message, identifying the sender’s name, location (to the extent possible), and category of the message - a missing persons report, a request for assistance, etc.  The message will go into a Ushahidi GeoRSS feed that will be captured by Sahana and fed into a simple Request Management system where the requests for assistance (such as “send water” to a certain village or neighborhood) can be made visible to relief organizations working on the ground.  Organizations can fulfill or claim requests for handling and message the person back that assistance is coming.  (Missing persons information will be captured by Google).
• Translation:  In addition, our translation project is now set up for Kreol and French translation and we may utilize a pool of Kreol-speaking volunteers being set up by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to help in these efforts.  Interested translators should be directed initially to http://translate.hfoss.eu/wiki/Translation to become oriented in the process.
• Shelter Registry and Disaster Victims Registry:  In the coming days, we expect that there will be a requirement to start tracking the location of temporary shelters now being established, and possible registration of the survivors.  We will prepare Sahana’s existing registries for such purposes, which will produce further consumable data layers as well as additional missing persons reconciliation capabilities.

If you want to help:

We are using the IRC #sahana channel on freenode as our main coordination tool.  Join the chat room to volunteer for tasks and someone from our core volunteer team will direct you - this room is actively staffed on a 24×7 basis.

But first, please check out the wiki pages to see what are the current requirements and areas of focus.  We have a lot of volunteer Python and PHP programmers already working on the codebase, but we can probably use more.  Please review the requirements page in particular to see where you might help.

We also have a large need for non-technical help - particularly for documentation support - user guidelines and instructions in particular - including some nice screenshots.  See http://trac.sahanapy.org/wiki/UserGuidelines to get started.

We also need help with Bug & Functionality testing.  Please submit bug reports and feature request to: http://trac.sahanapy.org/newticket

For documentation and testing efforts - please use the development site at http://haiti-orgsdev.sahanafoundation.org - NOT THE LIVE SITE PLEASE.

Finally, we could use help maintaining our own wiki - both the main page and requirements… much of this can be culled from the chat room logs - and helping to update some of the common public repositories of information about similar efforts, such as the crisis commons wiki at http://crisiscommons.org/wiki/index.php?title=Haiti/2010_Earthquake, although they are doing a pretty good job at tracking us ourselves.

Remember to add yourself to the wiki as part of team, and what you are doing.

Acknowledgements

Personally, I have never been a part of such a collaborative and cooperative effort on the part of different organizations to come together and to help each other and to not replicate efforts.  The Sahana community has worked closely and constantly with InSTEDD, Ushahidi, haitianquake.com, Google, the Crisis Camp participants, and others I apologize for not mentioning and we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish all that we have without this, and for this I am very grateful.

The around the clock efforts of many of the Sahana community are too numerous to mention here, and at risk of leaving anyone out, I would just like to thank everyone for all that they have done and been able to do while juggling responsibilities such as full-time jobs and families.

This has been a new model for Sahana deployments - rather than waiting for a specific customer to come forward to take ownership of Sahana, we have self-deployed and I think this will be a likely successful model for the future.  More and more, technology projects are stepping forward and doing good directly.

So go forth and do good.

Best regards,

Mark

==================================

Mark Prutsalis
President & CEO
Sahana Software Foundation
mark at  SahanaFoundation dot org
http://www.sahanafoundation.org

We concluded our experiments on Thursday, November 19, after 10+ days on the ground.  The list of accomplishments we had at Camp Roberts as part of the RELIEF experiments sponsored by the Naval Postgraduate School is lengthy and a bit overwhelming.  We have plans to write up a much more formal report on the experiments - as well as a joint paper to be submitted to ISCRAM, so there will be lots more information available soon.

Here’s a (not-so) brief list of our accomplishments from the past two weeks:

• We used the Organization Registry and Volunteer Management System to track all of the persons and organizations and experiments taking place at RELIEF 10-1. This was a valuable demonstration of capabilities that sparked interest amongst several NGOs and government observers.
• We used a $400 (two years ago price) eeePC/Netbook as our primary data collection server as a proof of concept of the low barriers to entry of Sahana. (We did run the sms gateway on a windows machine as we didn’t have a data cable for our cellphone that had linux drivers (long story)). We got a lot of mileage from this.
• We configured Sahana OpenLayers to pull in WMS layers from mosaiced and geo-referenced UAV and satellite imagery of the Camp Roberts experiment site (minor tasks that we didn’t get to last August).
• We had a lot of discussions about using open standards for data exchange with government and non-governmental participants. We see Sahana as being a leader in this area.
• We had the opportunity to brief FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate on Sahana and the benefits of open source / open standards in the humanitarian/disaster response application field during a conference call with technology companies from Silicon Valley
• We configured an SMS gateway running on a Windows-based server using Cygwin and SMSTools and a Nokia 3220 phone to send and receive SMS messages from Sahana.
• We developed an Android application to send in structured SMS messages to Sahana with embedded GPS coordinates. We also developed the format for a structured SMS message to be sent from any cell phone to Sahana.
• We developed a system to register a user name to a cellphone number.
• These inbound messages (from Android app and simple cellphone) are now processed by Sahana to plot points on the situation map using the DHS symbolset of incident information based on feature class reported by the Android and SMS message.
• We utilized a lot of DHS and NIMS/ICS terminology throughout the experiments to demonstrate to a US-audience how easily Sahana can be configured to be “NIMS-compliant”. This will eliminate an important barrier to entry for US government entities at all levels of government. As part of this, we have blueprinted the requirements to have Sahana automatically generate one of the ICS forms that first responders are required to fill out
• The SMS capabilities gives Sahana the ability to serve as an incredibly powerful crowdsourcing and assessment application (akin to Ushahidi, Geochat and others of this ilk), and combined with Sahana’s native disaster management capabilities, truly gives Sahana users a more powerful situational awareness tool.
• We developed the ability to poll the Sahana server and pull information about the last known location of a registered Sahana user, the last report(s) sent in by any Sahana user, or a keyword search of all points of information plotted on the situation map. In the future, we’ll want to develop more powerful means to pull data onto handheld devices…. both through SMS and where the Sahana server can be accessed directly by an app.
• We created a KML feed from Sahana data such that we could call it up in Google Earth. This is very attractive to a lot of potential users who use google earth to aggregate data from different feeds.
• We participated in an integrated field experiment with observers sending in reports via SMS and Android back to a command center that was utilizing all of these capabilities to get situational awareness of an event. Sahana, of course, outperformed a lot of other systems that had had a lot more financial resources put into them.

Outside of all these details - and I’m sure I am forgetting a bunch - the bottom line is that we did something - every day - that impressed the heck out of the people there - and it was without exception something that we did not have the capabilities to do the day before.

We also utilized Launchpad with bazaar and set up a team on LP and a development branch with bzr that we plan to push back up and merge with the trunk over the next couple of weeks.  This worked great.  We found Launchpad to have a lot of tools for developers that SF is lacking - and made our work with remote support much easier.

I must recognize our onsite team - particularly Chamindra de Silva and Gavin Treadgold - who were there with me for over 12 days in California.  David Bitner was with us in person for four days contributing invaluable GIS and open standards expertise and advocacy to the team - and continued to support us remotely after he left.  Trishan de Lanerolle and Chris Fei from the Trinity College H-FOSS project were with us for four days working on the Android App and the VMS system and any other thing that we asked of them.  Dan Zubey also was with us for about 2.5 days and helped with server administration and configuration.  Remotely, we could not have accomplished much without the virtual support of Antonio Alcorn from Trinity College’s H-FOSS project, who worked on the VMS, Ravith Botejue, who fixed many bugs for us, Ajay Kumar, who helped us get up to speed on Launchpad and bzr, and Fran Boon, who helped with LP administration and advised us how to set up the projects and team and branches correctly the first.

Getting things done the right way was important to us, and we hope that we’ve created a replicable model for future events.

We welcome community involvement in our Sahana-Relief-Team, which we’ll stand up again before the next RELIEF event in February 2010 in Monterey, CA.  You can find the project page for the Sahana Camp Roberts development work at https://launchpad.net/sahana-relief-experiments and join the Sahana-Relief-Team at https://launchpad.net/~sahana-relief-team.

There is a brief that I put together highlighting the recent accomplishments of Sahana at the RELIEF experiments.  It is accessible here on my Slideshare site.

The following are some photos from the event.

I wanted to give you all a quick update on the first two days activities at the RELIEF experiments at Camp Roberts in California.

Our team (Chamindra de Silva, Gavin Treadgold, Trishan de Lanerolle, Chris Fei and myself) arrived without incident at SFO on Monday afternoon and we all drove down together to Paso Robles in time for dinner with John Crowley representing National Defense University and the StarTides project, and Robert Kirkpatrick representing the Open Mobile Consortium.

On Tuesday, we worked on setting up our base infrastructure and began configuring the server.  Chamindra proposed using his eeePC netbook as the main server for the experiments - thus demonstrating an ultra-light, inexpensive deployment platform.  After finding Sourceforge unresponsive and completely unusable, we decided to set up a bzr branch on Launchpad for the code we would be using - pulled from the main Sahana trunk.  This enabled remote support from code contributors (such as Antonio Alcorn from Trinity College, who is already working on the VMS code and hopefully others) to be pushed automatically down to the eeePC server.  By the end of the day, we had this working.

On Wednesday, Gavin and I began in earnest to configure Sahana (locations, organizations, volunteer management system) with the assistance of some Naval Postgraduate School staff to be ready for the Monterey county exercise that begins on Friday.  We’ve spent a lot of time discussing how we make Sahana more NIMS/ICS compliant; we’ve set up organization services as the Emergency Support Functions (see http://tinyurl.com/yznwk4z) under the U.S. National Response Plan, and plan on using some ICS and NIMS symbology on the situation awareness maps.  Chamindra and Trishan are currently working feverishly on configuring the SMS/messaging system with a Bluetooth connected Palm Treo phone.  Ajay Kumar provided invaluable remote support on this.  Chris is working on getting Sahana onto the Android platform.

We have now set up a Sahana-Camp-Roberts subproject under the main Sahana project on Launchpad - that hosts a mirror of the main trunk code from Sourceforge as well as the code repository for the SahanaPy project.  Thanks to Fran Boon and Ajay for providing remote advice on how to set this up.  You can visit the Sahana-Camp-Roberts project page at http://tinyurl.com/ya3wzyj.  We do need help fixing bugs and making some feature request changes - if you are able to contribute remotely, please join the Sahana-Camp-Roberts team at http://tinyurl.com/ygecfpy.  We are working against this branch of code, and plan to push up all fixes and enhancements to the main trunk patches are developed once the experiment is over.  We are going to be putting feature change requests under blueprints - so please also check there for things to do.

Most of us are also actively using the #sahana chat room to collaborate with others - you can look for us there.

David Bitner arrives this afternoon and we will then be taking on a number of GIS-related experiments.  Dan Zubey comes in this evening to pitch in, and Brent Woodworth arrives tomorrow for a couple of days.

No kit foxes have been harmed by these events.

The Sahana Software Foundation is proud to be participating in the first International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM 2009). Co-organized by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) and John Carroll University (JCU), this unique event brings together seasoned humanitarian and human rights practitioners with leading scholars, software developers, policy makers and donors. Participating organizations include the UN Secretary General’s Office, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the EU’s Joint Research Center (JRC), for example. The purpose of ICCM 2009 is to formalize the field of crisis mapping and to shape the future of the field. The TED-style conference will include Ignite Talks, Tech Fair demo’s, Birds-of-a-feather sessions and Open roundtables. ICCM 2009 is sponsored by the Open Society Institute (OSI), Humanity United (HU) and the US Institute of Peace (USIP).

The full press release is available here. Follow @crisismapping on Twitter and also look out for the #ICCM09 tag!

Free and Open Source Software for Disaster Management: A Case Study of Sahana Disaster  Management System of Sri Lanka: a UNESCAP Technical Paper by the Information and Communications Technology and Disaster Risk Reduction Division of UNESCAP - A comprehensive and well-researched insight into Sahana

In an attempt to make a reusable component for form handling in Logistics, that supports validation and performs form processing automatically, I went through a few difficulties that are prevailing in the current libraries.

The form library does not use a common interface,

eg. lib_form.inc

function shn_form_button($name, $button_opts = null, $extra_opts = null)
function shn_form_text($label, $name, $text_opts = null, $extra_opts = null )
function shn_form_hidden($hidden_vars)
function shn_form_checkbox($label, $name, $text_opts = null, $extra_opts = null)
function shn_form_select($options,$label, $name,$select_opts = “”, $extra_opts = null)
function shn_form_radio($options, $label, $name, $select_opts = “”, $extra_opts = null)
function shn_form_radio2($options, $label, $name, $checked, $extra_opts = null)
function shn_form_multi_select($name,$options, $label, $select_opts = “”, $extra_opts = null)
function shn_form_opt_checkbox($opt_field,$extra_opts=null)
function shn_form_textarea($label, $name, $text_opts=null, $extra_opts = null)
function shn_form_upload($label, $name, $extra_opts = null)
function shn_form_label($label, $caption, $extra_opts = null)
function shn_form_password($label, $name, $text_opts = null, $extra_opts = null)
function shn_form_date($label, $name, $extra_opts=null)

The function signatures are different in even the same kind of form elements. Since the form elements do not have a common interface, it is hard to use these functions in a generalized way.

I feel that a better approach would be something like in the Zend Framework. The form elements in Zend framework are as below.

class Zend_Form_Element_Button extends Zend_Form_Element_Submit
class Zend_Form_Element_Reset extends Zend_Form_Element_Submit

class Zend_Form_Element_Checkbox extends Zend_Form_Element_Xhtml
class Zend_Form_Element_Captcha extends Zend_Form_Element_Xhtml
class Zend_Form_Element_File extends Zend_Form_Element_Xhtml
class Zend_Form_Element_Hash extends Zend_Form_Element_Xhtml
class Zend_Form_Element_Hidden extends Zend_Form_Element_Xhtml
class Zend_Form_Element_Image extends Zend_Form_Element_Xhtml
class Zend_Form_Element_Text extends Zend_Form_Element_Xhtml
class Zend_Form_Element_Textarea extends Zend_Form_Element_Xhtml
class Zend_Form_Element_Password extends Zend_Form_Element_Xhtml

class Zend_Form_Element_Multiselect extends Zend_Form_Element_Select
class Zend_Form_Element_Select extends Zend_Form_Element_Multi

class Zend_Form_Element_Radio extends Zend_Form_Element_Multi
class Zend_Form_Element_MultiCheckbox extends Zend_Form_Element_Multi

class Zend_Form_Element_Submit extends Zend_Form_Element_Xhtml

abstract class Zend_Form_Element_Multi extends Zend_Form_Element_Xhtml

abstract class Zend_Form_Element_Xhtml extends Zend_Form_Element

They all inherit from the same type, therefore having a common interface.

Zend is a Object Oriented framework whereas Sahana is procedural, therefore it might be hard to enforce the use of a common interface for the same kind of elements in Sahana libraries

Last couple of months we (The Respere Team) were implementing a Donor Management System for sarvodaya which provides some additional enhancements for existing Catalog, Inventory and request Management Modules. The additional enhancements that we have added are listed below.

Inventory Management Module

• Inventory Ownership - Track an owner for Inventory. Advantage of tracking an owner is user can categorize Inventories as Organization inventory, Shelter inventory, etc….
• Consolidated Items - Provides a UI to get little amount from several items and create a consolidated kit. Then the system keeps track on the newly created kits. (ex: 2 Books + 1 Pen + 1 Pencil = 1Educational Kit )
• Buy Items - Provides a UI to use donated money to buy particular items to particular inventories

Request/Aid Management Module

• Donor’s Organization - Capture Donor’s Organization details if the Donor is from a particular Organization
• Integration with Inventory Management System - When a pledge is added to the system that      particular pledge displays as an Inventory Item and when a request is fulfilled requested item amount deducts from particular inventories

Additional reports that we have provided

• Detailed Request Report
• Request Summary
• Detailed Pledges
• Pledge Summary
• Cash Pledge Report
• Item Pledge Report
• Donations Received
• Disbursement
• Inventory Report - Report about available items in inventories
• Inventory History - Report about Item transition history between inventories

It is a great pleassure to announce that all of the above features are functioning in SAHANA right now and hope to add those features in the proposed Logistic module as well

According to a request of a new theme for Sahana by Tim McNamara, me and Dilantha designed a new theme. You can visit demo version of our theme at http://demo.respere.com/dnn/.

The main objective of the this theme is to provide maximum space for the content of the modules. In default Sahana theme the menu items acquire 200px from the entire content space. Because of that the space that can be used to display module content will be reduced. So if we can hide the menu items when we are not using them, we can have extra 200px for the content area.

As Tim suggested we removed the menu divs from the current location and placed the in the top of the site. Using Javascript we make those divs appear and disappear by mouse events. When the mouse moves over or clicks on the “Sections” heading, the Module Menu will be shown. The sub menu item has a special feature. That is it can be pinned or unpinned according to the users choice. If the user feels like he/she wants to use the sub menus frequently, he/she can “Pin” the sub menu.

We are expecting comments on our new theme, so we can develop this theme to fulfil everyones needs.

As Niranga mentioned in previous post our main goal was to remove the side menu bars and give some more room for the content. So now you can see there is more space left in the content than earlier.We can use it display the content more clearly or to add more functionalities.

Here are some screen shots of the new theme

Still we publish this as a demo version. There are lot more functionalities  to be added. So we are kindly request you to visit the site and give us your ideas about this theme .It will be really helpful for us to improve the quality of this. we have already received some comments and new ideas to improve the theme from various people in sahana community . Those will be considered when developing the second phase of the theme and we will start it nearly in the future..