The video on the DisasterTech presentation by Mikel Maron and Jesse Robins at Where 2.0 is an interesting insight into Innovation in Disaster Response. Also interesting is the issues mentioned of getting geeky innovations into mainstream disaster-relief operations, or, as they say, making technology count. Absolutely true: but as Paul Currion mentions, this factor must and should be taken into mind as well: there are many technological events out there, but the dots should be connected. This I guess is true for many technologies, where the bigger players who have more visibility are more successful. I think Mikel’s comment on the need for a Champion for technological innovation stands true here - the need for someone to adapt the technology, which in turn brings a lot of visibility to it. Let me for instance take Sahana: since Sahana is being used widely in many disaster deployments, it in turn has paved the way for newer technology integrated into it to work in real-world scenarios.

It would be interesting to see how the newer features of Sahana, such as GIS, AJAXified custom reports, Webservices, SMS Messaging and the likes are used in future deployments, in real world scenarios. Crisis response is such that technology MUST work: and a lot of testing is needed to test out the practicality of these applications to make them ready for potential deployment usage. But that in turn brings us to the critical question: is there a line that should be drawn in terms of practicality vs. cutting-edge technology for disaster response technology? In my opinion, Sahana is well balanced now - its got the right mix of practical applications, along with innovative technological solutions: and there are newer , much needed features being built that are coming soon. But will Sahana become too technologically bloated some-day where technology might hinder deployment? Scary thought, but I guess that can be true, given the criticality of the domain.

Sourceforge Community award is back again. Nomination process will be finish by late June. Those who would like to nominate Sahana project for these awards (individuals can nominate a project for multiple awards) , can now click following button.

It’s clear that project like Sahana (which aligned to disaster management and humanitarian domain) needs more visibility, than normal FOSS projects. However, Sahana project has been recognized number of times in the past. Sourceforge project of the Month - 2006 and Social Benefit Award - 2006 by FSF, were significant.

Along with the recent surge in the Geographical Information System (GIS) development stuff of Sahana, I guess its high time I posted something on this:  The Sahana Disaster Management System’s geographical capability has been improving in recent times. The purpose of GIS development in Sahana (a.k.a SahanaGIS) is  not to create a fully functional GIS: there are enough and more brilliant solutions out there: rather, our focus is on allowing users to get the maximum geographical capabilty out of the system, by making use of existing systems and standards.

The SahanaGIS is built on a distributed architecture of small reusable components that serve each other. Each component is standard-compliant based on Open Standards, and makes use of existing F/OSS projects and services. This allows for standards based interoperability with existing systems, and existing F/OSS or proprietary GIS solutions can be used interchangeably with these components to achieve full GIS capability within Sahana through collaboration. At deployment, Sahana would probably contain a rich set of data regarding the disaster it is setup to manage: the ability to share this data integrated with spatial data of the region would mean a rich set of geographical data being served out to the GIS community in times of a disaster. This project also provides the ability to manage the Sahana data sources, feeds, files and mapping APIs via a GIS catalog module, allowing a wide variety of sources to be added and configured on the fly, which means that a fairly substantial GIS can be configured by someone with little or no experience of GIS.

SahanaGIS provides the flexibility for users to use tools of their preference: we do not intend to build a newer tool to replace existing tools that users are comfortable with. For instance, data served out of Sahana can be viewed using the inbuilt Sahana GIS client built uing OpenLayers. Alternatively, users can use the myriad of GIS clients out there: qGIS, uDig and the likes, to acheive the same. Similarly, mapping servers such as UMN/Mapserver can be setup to serve data to Sahana clients. Thus, Sahana can be used within existing GIS infrastructure, without distrupting the flow by requiring users to migrate to newer software: which is not practical during disasters, especially considering the level of expertise required in Geographical Science.
Well, that’s a start from me: definitely more stuff to come…

May 13, 2008, Colombo:
The Sahana Messaging and Alerting Module, which recently received a major face lift (well, more than a face lift: actually and overall lift ) courtesy of Respere, was presented at the LirneASIA colloquium for Disaster Management and Messaging. With an attentive audience, the colloquium was a success, and we managed to gather a lot of valuable feedback for the evolution of the module.

The Sahana Messaging and Alerting Module (acronym: SMAM) is a Sahana module that concentrates on sending messages to end users. There has been a lot of discussion on the Sahana lists and elsewhere regarding the efficiency of short/text messages during times of a disaster, and its ability to somewhat withstand the issue of messages not getting through due to network congestion problems during disasters: which is exactly why we concentrated on SMS as the primary mesaging medium for sending messages. However, having other media such as the implemented EMail functionality, and future implementations such as MMS and IM for messaging is important as well: in a period where messages reaching its recipients is doubtful, I guess duplicating the effort through various media might ensure that at least some messages get through.

I guess there are four defining characteristics of the SMAM.
1. Free/Open Source Software solution: The solution is F/OSS: thus with its transparency and large user development community, the module would definitely be improved and evolved by many developers. Even as we speak, there is a Google Summer of Code project to improve the module and build in newer features.

2. Tight integration with Sahana: The module is part of the Sahana Disaster Management System, which in turn means many benefits. Sahana consists of a large community consisting of end users, practitioners, developers, technical specialists, domain experts, researchers, academics and the like: all of whom could provide many valuable contributions to the module as a whole. Secondly, a live deployment of Sahana is bound to contain a rich dataset of valuable disaster related information. The SMAM can make use of this information in its operation: say, it has the ability to send out alerts to all people living within 100m of the coastline, making use of the People’s registries and GIS. Or possibly messages to all volunteers working in X and Y regions under Z sectors: the data being provided by the Organization Registry and the Volunteer Managment Module. Thus the possibilities are endless, and Sahana has the modules that could prove this to be a very useful aspect of an alerting system.

3. The solution is web based: is this good? Of course it is - this means that accessibility to the system is quite flexible: the system can be accessed over the Intranet or the Internet, depending on how you set it up: and consisting of the Sahana Access Control procedures, access can be controlled quite well. On the other hand, the system can be run as a standalone system as well: giving the best of both worlds

4. Finally, we built in a ‘plugin architecture’ for the messaging module. This, inspired the by the work done on the Sahana GIS stuff, allows the developer to plug in various plugins to achieve the required functionality. In the SMAM, the SMS Gateway is built in such a way: we’ve tested the system by plugging in Kannel and SMSTools as the SMS Gateways: this is quite useful, since both Kannel and SMSTools works in distinct ways and have their distinct advantages: which makes a lot sense depending on how the system is hosted, and what permissions the system has. A plugin architecture allows the developer to write interface code that will ensure that the gateway works with Sahana: and thus, any gateway can be plugged in.

More of this to come soon: I just gave a technical overview in this post.

Related Posts:
ICT4Peace - Sanjana Hathoduwa
LBO - Rohan Samarajeewa

Following the devastation of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, the usual questions arise: how, why and where can ICT help.. Although this time round, the situation is a bit more complicated. However, the global humanitarian community is rising to the challenge as well. An instance of Sahana has been setup, with the help of InSTEDD. Another Sahana instance is hosted at Relief.Asia : Currently, efforts are underway to localize the system into Burmese. Also looking quite promising are the efforts with the Thuraya mobile devices. Coordinates from the device’s in-built GPS receiver can be text messaged via SMS to a service which can then be used in collaboration with GIS. This is exactly what’s on the roadmap for Sahana; which contains both the SMS backend and the GIS backend/front-end, which leaves a small component to be developed to parse coordinates, and then act on it - maybe send out emails, display them on maps, show them in the Sahana Situation Mapping Module etc. Anyways, to the topic at hand: now that Sahana is setup, it would be interesting to see how the other technologies work around it. Challenging deployments add to the experience, and one day, maybe a total solution would be readily available. GeoChat and Twitter seem to be hot on the charts as well - a ready made case for social networking, and the future semantic web..

More articles from Paul Currion, Eduardo Jezierski…

Jakarta, March 24, 2008

IOSN and InWEnt, in collaboration with the State Ministry for Research and Technology(RISTEK), Indonesia, conducted the F/OSS Sahana GIS Training of Trainers workshop in Jakarta, Indonesia, from the 24th to 28th March 2008. The Sahana component of the training was conducted by Didieb and Diki from Indonesia, whilst the Sahana FOSS GIS component was conducted by Firman Hadi. The workshop concentrated on Sahana GIS, setting up a GIS server, map and layer edition, FOSS GIS, and integration between the Sahana Open Layers client and a GIS server. Participants of the event ranged from Indonesia to Bangladesh.

Manilla, April 24, 2007.
The Bluepoint Foundation and the Saudi Investment Group of Marketing, in collaboration with the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC), hosted the Philippines Sahana Initiative in April, 2007. This event consisted of a workshop and training sessions for members of NDCC and selected participants of the Regional Disaster Coordinating Centers of Philippines, participants from the government and the civil society. The training was conducted by Ravindra de Silva and Mifan Careem, both members of the Sahana Project. The event also included a Sahana presentation at the Office of Civilian Defence, Philippines, and a visit to the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) – Department of Science and Technology (DOST). PSI aims to equip participants with the necessary skills for the deployment of Sahana as a centralized, nationwide disaster management system for the efficient coordination of relief efforts during disasters.

2006: Another research paper on Sahana, this time from the world of Sahana GIS. The paper was presented at ISCRAM, under the Geographic Information Science for Crisis Management session.

Title: GIS Integration in the Sahana Disaster Management System

Authors: M. Careem, D. Bitner, R.De Silva

Published at: ISCRAM

Presented at: ISCRAM, Delft, Netherlands, by Mifan Careem

Abstract:

Disaster Management often involves using Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to manage large amounts of data efficiently. Data during a disaster are often related to geographic features or spatial data, thus requiring special forms of data management software to utilize and manage them efficiently. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are specialized database systems with software that can analyze and display data using digitized maps and tables for decision making. Preparing and correctly formatting data for use in a GIS is nontrivial, and it is even more challenging during disasters because of tight time constraints and inherent unpredictability of many natural disasters. This paper describes the important role of a GIS in disaster management, and discusses the most common characteristics of GIS and their potential use in disaster response. We follow up with a detailed description of the GIS prototype in the Sahana Disaster Management System.

In 2006, the Sahana Research Team in Sri Lanka produced its first research paper on Sahana, which was presented at the 2nd International Conference on Information and Automation, 2006, in Colombo.

Title: Sahana: An Overview of a Disaster Management System

Authors: M. Careem, C. De Silva, R. De Silva, L. Rachid and S. Weerawarana

Published at: IEEEXplore

Abstract:

Large scale disasters bring together a diversity of organizations and produce massive amounts of heterogeneous data that must be managed by these organizations. The lack of effective ICT solutions can lead to a lack of coordination and chaos among these organizations, as they track victims’ needs and respond to the disaster. The result can be delayed or ineffective response, the potential wastage of pledged support,imbalances in aid distribution, and a lack of transparency. ICT solutions to manage disasters can potentially improve efficiency and effectiveness.Sahana is a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) application that aims to be a comprehensive solution for information management in relief operations, recovery and rehabilitation. This paper addresses the alignment between FOSS development and humanitarian applications. It then describes the anatomy of the Sahana system.We follow up with a case study of Sahana deployments and lessons learned.

In 2006, Networkworld named Sahana in the list of the top 10 Open Source companies to watch out for:

Networkworld Article: Top 10 Open Source Companies to watch out for
Their next article, published sometime later, showed that their predictions were spot on, as Sahana went on to receive the FSF Award for Social Benefit 2006, after the first article was published:
Networkworld: Top 10 Open Source Companies: Where are they now