Manila, February 19-24, 2009

IBM-Philippines recently organized a Sahana training workshop for members of NDCC, NDCC member agencies and representatives of IBM-Philippines. The workshop was held at the IBM Plaza in Manila, Philippines from the 19th to the 24th February, 2009, and the training was conducted by Chamindra de Silva of Virtusa/LSF and Mifan Careem of Respere.

The 4 day training was broken up into 2 categories - an overview of the Sahana system and the user training was held on the first 2 days, whilst a developer training focusing on the internals of Sahana was held the next 2 days.

I was happy to see the level of enthusiasm from the participants of the workshop- the participants evaluated the system and suggested improvements to it overall from a user perspective - they also discussed the potential of using Sahana in the Philippines and listed specific requirements based on their experience.

All in all, the 4 day training turned out to be immensely successful, and was a satisfying experience to both the participants and the trainers. Kudos to IBM-Philippines for organizing this.

Sahana are again applying to participate in the Google Summer of Code.
Please help us to develop concrete proposals to ensure a successful application for which students can apply for. We need to have this in by March 13th.

See the Wiki: http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php?id=dev:sahana_gsoc09_ideas

Please contact through the mailing list: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sahana-maindev

For a while now, the Sahana PMC has been discussing the benefits of fast-tracking a stable public 1.0 release of Sahana.  We’d like to proceed with a plan to publicly release Sahana 1.0 by July 15 of this year.  This will be a stable and proven release of Sahana’s best features and functionality - based on the current 0.6.2.2 release candidate.

This means that Sahana 1.0 will not include the features and functionality planned for Sahana 0.7 and 0.8 as defined on the development wiki.   This does not mean that we are foregoing or bypassing these upgrades at all - rather we will providing a stable main trunk on which to base these new branches for a 1.1 and 1.2 release.

Please visit this page of the wiki to review the strategic plan for the release of Sahana 1.0.  You will also find  a link to this page on the release roadmap in the development wiki.

However, all that said, before we finalize this decision to limit Sahana 1.0 to the feature-set of 0.6.2.2, I wanted to publicly poll Sahana users and developers and the broader humanitarian ICT community for nominations of any features in development, customized for a deployment, part of an experimental branch, GSOC 2008 code, or any other feature request that you feel is absolutely critical to include in a Sahana 1.0 release.  The reason we would consider adding to 0.6.2.2’s features would be only from the perspective of this functionality or feature being mission critical to the disaster management capabilities of Sahana - and not just because the code has been written and is (mostly) bug-free.  (But the code also has be already in a state that it could be reliably tested and integrated into the main branch within the next 2-3 months).  We will take nominations into consideration and adjust the project plan for the release of Sahana 1.0 accordingly.

I’m also looking for volunteers to be a part of the release team.  Details of the two teams and their responsibilities are detailed on the wiki - Green (of disaster management domain experts) and Yellow (developers/coders) are needed that will see Sahana through this process.  If you are willing to participate in this process, please let me know or add your name on the wiki.

Please make any and all nominations for features and functionality not in release candidate 0.6.2.2 that need to be included in Sahana 1.0 by March 15, 2009.  Comments here are welcome, but also please send this information back to the public Sahana lists (maindev or user) for consideration and include:

o  your name,

o  the organization you represent,

o  experience using Sahana,

o  the feature/functionality being requested to include in Sahana 1.0

o  why this feature/functionality is critical to Sahana’s disaster management capabilities

The Free and Open Source Software Community of Sri Lanka [FOSS.LK] is hosting the 1^st Annual SAHANA Conference on March 24 & 25, 2009. In its inaugural year, the conference will provide opportunities for anyone involved in Disaster/Emergency management to network and share best practices with each other.

The conference is aptly named SAHANA, meaning “Relief” in Sinhala which is an official language of Sri Lanka, and is named after the “SAHANA Disaster Management System“.

The event will also be followed by a BarCamp on March 26, 2009.

More details about the event can be found here: http://sahana2009.foss.lk/index.html

After conducting the first ever Localization sprint for Sahana sometime back, we had a Hackfest planned at FOSSKriti where I saw awesome collaboration work happening real time for the first time !!

The plan: Coding for Sahana in Python

Date/Time: February 14th 2009, 1530 UTC.

Venue: Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
and #sahana on irc.freenode.net the official project IRC channel for online collaboration/communication with the team.

Why on a Valentines Day?: Because we love Sahana!

Team Sahana at Hackfest:

• Fran Boon [irc/skype]
• Chamindra de Silva [irc/skype]
• Dominic König [irc/skype]
• Ajay Kumar [onsite]

Special Thanks to Satyakaam Goswaami, who led the “Sahana Testing” track and Massimo Di Pierro, author of Web2Py who led the students on queries related to Web2Py.

What happened there?:

• We saw around 80+ students initially filled in the labs at the venue.
• Students were briefed about what Sahana is in the talk delivered by me earlier.
• Fran Boon, gave a brief outline and introduction on what to expect and what we will be doing over a Video Call on Skype.
• Introduction of the track leads and tasks we all were to address.
• Addressing newbie questions right from starting to code in Linux development environment using a text editor to what Open Source or what Sahana is.
• Since the main channel #sahana got too noisy and bombarded with all sorts of questions from all the students present at the venue, we decided to split the focus.
• We had #sahana-classroom to deal with total newbie related questions, which Chamindra gracefully handled :).
• #sahana-testing room was created to handle Testing related discussion which Satyakaam handled.
• #sahana - For core development on SahanaPy handled by Fran Boon.
• Whenever a question used to pop-up on IRC, I used to explain it to the student at the venue itself so as to divert attention of the traffic from #sahana and let the leads focus on other issues.
• Massimo, patiently handled local setup issues with the organisers and help setup the development environment for the students, since the IIT K network was not accessible from outside and checking out code etc was a pain.
• Since it was an overnight event, we had limitations and not all people stayed till the end. We had to shut down the labs at 1 am local India time and we had people working on Sahana till the end
• The organisers, being students themselves, were assisting in the local issues and helping the newbies get started as well.

Overall experience:

This was something happening for the first time on such a large scale, for which we were not really prepared since it was not anticipated! We had a great time learning things, showing code, writing code, testing Sahana, getting students started to contribute to Sahana. The whole excitement for me was to see various project leads handling the issues and collaborating with the students on IRC for the first time. I never saw them all at once on IRC so far and we all discussing development :D.

So it was a great experience for me to be a part of such an initiative. This event has had a lasting effect with students asking about Sahana and how to get started with its development who might as well apply for Sahana in Google Summer of Code 2009.

I loved being at FOSSkriti and get an experience of a lifetime, this is a place I would want to visit next year as well

Pictures from the venue here: http://picasaweb.google.com/ajuonline/SahanaPyHackfestFOSSKriti

Complete event log and report including IRC logs located here: https://trac.sahanapy.org/wiki/FOSSkriti

SahanaPy is a ground-up rewrite of Sahana Phase 2 using Web2Py, which is a MVC web application framework for Rapid Application Development based on Python. The SahanaPy code base also introduces distributed version control with Bazaar - with the main repository currently hosted on Launchpad.

SahanaPy is currently an experimental branch, since rewriting a large, working application is not something to be undertaken lightly. It is a lot of work & the payback at this stage isn’t clear. It is a project started by few Sahana developers changing focus from PHP to Python. Surely this attracts a lot of questions, some of them are addressed on the FAQ section here.

Project page & wiki: http://www.sahanapy.org

Project hosted at Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/sahana

Change is good. Choice is even better So now we have Sahana available in two flavours: PHP & Python, take your pick and ….

“Code for Sahana” !! Because, I do!

Recently I had planned to attend and present Sahana to the students audience at two events in India where the main agenda of my talk was to make them aware of the HFOSS ideology and Sahana, as a part of the community building efforts I have been doing in India.

Being a student myself, I am highly excited to attend such events and make sure I attend them and spread Sahana

First event to attend was GNUnify 09, which was at “Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research“, Pune. It is an annual gathering of the techies & community organised by the SICR & Pune GNU/Linux Users Group. It was a two day event held from 13th - 14th Feb 2009, I was present for the first day. The best take home, apart from excited students interested in taking up work on Sahana as a part of their academics, was a student volunteer coming up and sharing his thoughts on using Sahana to maintain the database of all people related information for the country starting with his city Pune, which can be used to access information in case such an emergency situation arises. As he pointed out, we don’t have a central identity mechanism in India as a national ID, but have various different IDs like the Voter ID, Ration Card, Passport. The student also mentioned they have a group at their college which works on Social issues who might be willing to take up work on Sahana :). Audience here comprised of FOSS Contributors & Professionals, Students, Teachers.

Second event was FOSSKriti, at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur from February 12-15th 2009, where I was for the last 2 days of the event. FOSSKriti is the FOSS component of their annual technical festival called Techkriti which attracts a huge student crowd from across India each year. This place attracted a larger student audience since it was a student only event and the organizers were an awesome bunch since they were students as well!

The slides of the talk:

I am currently working on developing a client application for Sahana, which can also act as a standalone data collecting tool for field reporters and people working in the process of disaster relief & management.

What is Openmoko™?

1.    Openmoko is a Linux distribution designed for open mobile computing platforms, such as, but not limited to, cellphones.
2.    Openmoko is the company behind the Openmoko Linux distribution. Openmoko also manufactures mobile computing platforms, such as the Neo FreeRunner.”

MAIN OBJECTIVES
•    The primary objective of the project is to make use of touch interface based cellphones with Wi-Fi, GPS, and GPRS as an effective disaster reporting & communication tool which interacts with the Sahana main system, either real time or by synchronization when accessible with the device.
•    The project aims at creating a “new application stack” over mobile devices which can be further expanded to provide all the features of the Sahana system, possible on a mobile device.
•    Having a compact and handy mobile device as an assistive tool and as a replacement for PCs/Laptops at relief camps for use in data reporting and information access from the main Sahana system.

A complete detailed proposal that I have drafted is available here in PDF format.

I am also collecting opinions from various domain experts and experienced people to provide suggestions and inputs in the form of a short questionnaire located here.

Please do provide your inputs and suggestions on the same!

Sahana was recently presented at PANACeA at the Earls Regency in Kandy, Sri Lanka, by yours truly. The first thing that struck me at this conference/workshop with a focus on e-health was the name: PANAceA:

PAN Asian Collaboration for Evidence-based eHealth Adoption and Application (PANACeA) is an initiative to generate evidence in the field of eHealth within the Asian context, by forming a network of researchers and research projects from developing Asian countries. PANACeA supports multinational projects to evaluate eHealth solution in the field and generate evidence through methodologically sound research. The evidence acquired through these projects will be scalable and generalisable to othe developing countries. The results will be used to advocate policies on eHealth in Asian countries.

Which is nice, since Panacea is also the goddess of healing in Greek mythology. The participants were quite interested in the system, which was appropriately presented under the Free and Open Source Software session of the workshop. The messaging module of Sahana was also presented separately the next day, within the RTBP project context.