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.