And it begins - a brand new F/OSS project: a Human Rights Case Management System, based on Sahana. OpenEvsys, coined from Open Events System, is a tool to manage human rights cases - it is based on the HURIDOCS set of standards and methodologies, collectively known as the Events Standard Format.

Respere, the company specializing in Sahana services, won the project in response to an open RFP from HURIDOCS, with its solution based on and reusing Sahana - more specifically the underlying Sahana Application Framework. The teams at Respere and HURIDOCS and the community at large, are excited at this partnership - there is a lot of anticipated collaboration between the Sahana project/community and the OpenEvsys project and its upcoming community. This is bound to be a win-win scenario for both projects as well.

OpenEvsys stands for the Open Events System - the system will be web-based, and will make use of an improved version of the Sahana Application Framework to provide base framework level functionality - and of course, the improvements would find its way into the Sahana project as well. The system would adhere to various standards, and will consist of simple but highly intuitive User Interfaces to cater to field workers. Like its underlying sibling, it would be LAMP based - built on PHP and AJAX, with database abstraction, and running atop the Apache2 Web Server.

The system is inspired by WinEvsys - a desktop based system implementing the same model, and which has been used in the past. WinEvsys was used by HURIDOCS and partners for some time now - WinEvsys is now making way for OpenEvsys, which would introduce multi-user usage and collaboration between systems, alongside many other improvements. Hats off to WinEvsys, for its service thus far.

A key difference we see between OpenEvsys and Sahana is the longevity of the system - whilst Sahana has been used for shorter durations and is expected to do so, an OpenEvsys instance is expected to run for 20 years or more - thus a lot of detail would have to go into building a highly stable system - and at the same time efficiently handle the changes in platform etc.

We have currently completed requirements gathering for the project - pretty soon, all the infrastructure would be setup for the project to launch itself into cyberspace.