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.