talksahana

Sahana @mukt.in 2008 Hyderabad, India

Ajay Kumar — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 19:34:14 +0000

mukt.in is a FOSS promotion event which attracts audiences who are Newbies, Students, Professional, FOSS Advocates [not lawyers ;-)] , and speakers from other FOSS Projects/communities… This year the venue was Computer Science Department, Osmania University, Hyderabad. It was a 3 Day event, 1-3 August, 2008, currently in their second year of running.

Being introduced to Sahana was something that happened to me over an year back while working for my academic project, where I checked out Sahana and got to know about it.

With Google Summer of Code 2008 I got a chance to *actually* work and contribute ..

My main agenda at the event was to showcase:

what Sahana is
how kOoL it is
how it *has* been used in post-disaster situations
how can people/community contribute to it..

The best thing about contributing to Sahana, is you don’t really have to be a programmer in order to contribute. If you are an expert in any of the Domain/areas which concerns with the technology used, the humanitarian domain, an NGO, an independent citizen journalist, a Usability expert… you could just hop in to our mailing lists, share your knowledge, make suggestions, post feedback about the application & just share your own experience. Every bit helps!

Addressing audience queries from Students, who found the project exciting and were willing to contribute, I told them how they could go about working on the project, how Sahana can be used in India, scope for Translation, what kind of technologies it uses and how the students can learn from the code base and get started using the resources available.

I had a bunch of professionals curious to know about Sahana, some of them had never heard of something like this, and were really fascinated by the idea. So talking for Sahana and as a Sahana Developer I felt great and excited to… “talk”

After my talk, I also demonstrated the Sahana installation I had and features of the Sahana DMS.

It would be really great to see some of them, students, coming forward and getting into action with the Sahana code and more people coming to know about Sahana and spreading awareness…

The talk slides are available here & here…

Sahana-DUMBO in Myanmar

mifan — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:05:02 +0000

Following the Sahana activities in Myanmar, the DUMBO(Digital Ubiquitous Mobile Broadband OLSR)-Sahana project has taken wings and is seeing a lot of success. The links below provide interesting insight into the wonderful work taking place:
DUMBO-Sahana in Myanmar
Nargis Action Group, Myanmar
Interlab Training Photos

Sahana in Thailand

mifan — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:04:38 +0000

Last year, Ravindra and I had the honor of presenting Sahana at the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security of Thailand, in Bangkok, Thailand. We noticed at the event that there were already a couple of University students from Thailand working on Sahana, which is always an encouragement, and in line with the overall goal of creating Sahana communities globally. I just came across a couple of articles of the event, which I link to here (some in Thai..)
Sahana Disaster Management System (thai)
Thailand’s Ministry of Social Development and Human Security has intention to use Sahana
IOSN Article

Sahana in China

paul — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:56:52 +0000

And another article on Sahana, this time from the recent Sichuan earthquake deployment - unfortunately for those of us with poor language skills, only available in Mandarin! Thanks to Qihao Miao from the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of Shanghai, who wrote the article and hopefully will continue to be involved with Sahana.

Erm… if anybody out there speaks Mandarin, a translation would be lovely!

BusinessWeek

paul — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:50:18 +0000

Sahana makes a brief appearance in BusinessWeek, courtesy of Janet Ginsburg. The article is a wider discussion of the role of disaster response in innovation (and vice versa), with a focus on the Strong Angel III exercise a while back. The emphasis on Sahana as an innovative approach (FOSS), and not just an innovative platform is good to see!

Web hits to detect Earthquakes

jens — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:18:40 +0000

An interesting article I came across recently describes the use of Internet traffic counters to track “web hits” in order to determine earthquake locations, according to NewScientistTech. Thus based on the surge in ‘Hits’ for a certain geographic area per unit time, it can be determined to some extent that something has taken place in the region - in this case, an earthquake. The study is carried out based on usage statistics of European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre. Again, social networking to the rescue…

Sahana mentioned in MySQL founder’s Open Letter

mifan — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:45:24 +0000

Ok - pretty outdated. But, as part of my pledge to get anything and everything on Sahana blogged, here goes.

Sahana was mentioned in this Open Letter to the community by MySQL founders: David Axmark and Michel Widenius

Some other awe-inspiring MySQL stats that show the momentum of MySQL:
Major free software projects and hugely-popular Web sites such as the Sahana (disaster recovery system for the tsunami), Ensembl.org and Human Genome Project (used for cancer research), Wikipedia, Bugzilla, Craigslist, Feedster, Flickr, Freshmeat, LiveJournal, Neopets, Slashdot, SugarCRM, Technorati, Wordpress, CERN’s ATLAS Experiment — all taking advantage of MySQL’s speed, ease of use, flexibility, scalability and ecosystem.

Source

Sahana on OLPC

jo — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 05:54:46 +0000

Couple of months earlier I had a chance to install Sahana on a OLPC. After some initial search I realise the best solution would be to create an OS image with Sahana because then the installation would be easy. There are two basic image types for olpc which are devel_ext3 for live USBs and devel_jffs2 for on-board nand flash. I choose to create the live USB image sine it was easy to work with and most importantly I did not want to mess the existing system on the olpc I got, which is a machine brought here for demonstration.

To build custom images there is a package called pilgrim which contains a bunch of tools to help you out. You can specify which repositories you want to use and which packages you want to install on the image in pilgrims configuration file. Then you run the pilgrim-autobuild command, and it will download the specified packages and build the image. The tool is capable of building both images in a single run. For more information on how to do this visit http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Building_custom_images.

The pilgrim tool is bit time consuming ( this may be because the internet connection I used was bit slow ) so I decided to remaster an existing image. I downloaded the latest stable image from olpc.download.redhat.com and mount it to a local directory. Then downloaded the necessary server packages from the fedora core 8 repository. Since the olpc is based on x86 architecture packages build for i386 architecture will probably work. Next step was to chroot to the image directory and install the packages using rpm command. Aftter that I install and configure the sahana stable version on it. Now it is possible to unmount the image and flash it to a usb drive. Then plug the usb to an olpc and boot from it. To try out the image I build visit http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php?id=doc:olpcimg:english.

Sahana worked smoothly on the OLPC and the page load speed was very good too considering limited hardware resources. And the system was usable the only problem I found was the tiny key board which is bit hard to type. So it seems that Sahana can be used with an olpc to collect information in a disasters situation.

Sahana development for Myanmar

pradeeper — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 09:24:43 +0000

Multiple user groups,Industry and FOSS/GIS communities started an effort to develop/customize Sahana for the recent disaster in Myanmar (Cyclone Nargis). The whole effort started based on a three day (3-5 June) conference call and a user training held by some of the Sahana community members.

This Team (or rather group) consist of a number of locals/International volunteers, Humanitarians, and representatives of IBM US/Aus, InSTEDD,LSF, Respere and OpenStreetMap.

Team decided to do the customization based on the last stable release of Sahana (which is 0.6.2) and incorporate some of the important features (specially GIS functionality including TMS support for OpenStreetMap) from the unstable release. This will be a definite challenge for the developers to merge some of the bleeding edge code with relatively old code, while maintaining the stability on the whole application.

As an outcome of these discussions, there was a request from the team to have a separate CVS branch for this customization. Based on the CVS convention, I managed to find the time to create a new deployment branch for this, known as ‘dep_0_6_2_myanmar’. This branch can be obtained by anyone (as anonymous user) by issuing following,

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@sahana.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/sahana co -r dep_0_6_2_myanmar -P sahana-phase2

Sahana project perspective, this is going to be a major push for releasing another stable version of the application soon. The six month old current stable application needs another release.

GIS Catalog : choose thy layers!

mifan — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:28:02 +0000

Choice: an important thing, especially if you’re short of time and other valuable resources, especially during crisis situations. I mentioned sometime back that the goal of the SahanaGIS work was to allow existing GIS users, using existing technologies, to make use of the system without disrupting the flow:The GIS catalog is an important part of this..

The Sahana GIS catalog is an administrative module within Sahana that allows users to configure geographical data/feeds. It attempts to provide users with a somewhat intuitive interface to configure various layers, which in turn can be viewed by the Sahana GIS client which uses OpenLayers. Support for newer ‘types’ of layers/feeds are added frequently: our goal is to support quite a few of these in the near future.

At the time of writing, the following are configurable and thus usable from within Sahana: OpenStreetMap (both Mapnik and Osmarenderer), remote and local TMS layers, remote and local WMS layers, Commercial Mapping APIs: GoogleMaps, YahooMaps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Multimap, and feeds: GeoRSS and KML. The files layer can be used to upload and use the following: KML, GML, OSM. WMS and TMS layers accept multiple layers within them. Layers can be enabled by the administrator so that they are visible within the OL mapping client by default. This works perfectly for data from custom mapping servers: either local or remote. Maps served as WMS via mapping servers such as UMN/Mapserver can be accessed by configuring the WMS layer in the GIS catalog. Likewise, tiles from TileCache and the likes can be accessed by configuring TMS to point to them. In turn, the configured layers are displayed within the mapping client, depending on their visibility settings. There are a lot of items on the roadmap as well: including WFS support… Check out the Sahana GIS Infrastructure Roadmap to see what we’re upto…