Manila, February 19-24, 2009

IBM-Philippines recently organized a Sahana training workshop for members of NDCC, NDCC member agencies and representatives of IBM-Philippines. The workshop was held at the IBM Plaza in Manila, Philippines from the 19th to the 24th February, 2009, and the training was conducted by Chamindra de Silva of Virtusa/LSF and Mifan Careem of Respere.

The 4 day training was broken up into 2 categories - an overview of the Sahana system and the user training was held on the first 2 days, whilst a developer training focusing on the internals of Sahana was held the next 2 days.

I was happy to see the level of enthusiasm from the participants of the workshop- the participants evaluated the system and suggested improvements to it overall from a user perspective - they also discussed the potential of using Sahana in the Philippines and listed specific requirements based on their experience.

All in all, the 4 day training turned out to be immensely successful, and was a satisfying experience to both the participants and the trainers. Kudos to IBM-Philippines for organizing this.

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.

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 devastating destruction of Cycone Sidr in Bangladesh, it was time for people to help out in the recovery efforts. Pradeeper and myself (Mifan), representing the Sahana team, were flown in courtesy of IBM, where we teamed up with Brent Woodworth of the IBM Crisis Response Team, Mike Donahue of the ITCrisis Team and Shahzaman Mozumder of Thakral IS in Bangladesh. Together we had many meetings and presentations to the DMB, DMIC, the consortium of NGOs and other relief orgs. It was nice to see the Disaster Management Bureau, under the leadership of Mr. Abu Sadique, act quicky on making the decision to go ahead with the deployment of Sahana: thus the following days were for the training of a specialist group to use and manage Sahana. The training group, along with members from the DMB, consisted of Afifa and Rajan, 2 MSc students of the Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology under the guidance of Prof. Mehedi Ahmed Ansary and Dr. Ashutosh Sutra Dhar. We installed a branched version of Sahana on the DMB server and trained the DMB staff on its usage. To match the data gathering process of the DMB, we also developed a Damage Assessment Registry which could produce the required reports based on the reports. Members of the Sahana team also worked remotely on customization and stabilizing the branch.
A meeting with the local Bangladesh Open Source and Linux User’s Groups also proved quite useful: a team is now being built consisting of all the related volunteer groups that would build skills in deploying, training,customizing and using Sahana, which would help out in evolving the system further to Bangladesh’s need.
This deployment would certainly prove useful in the relief efforts of the upcoming weeks. Lets hope that the system would make a positive difference in the efforts, and our thoughts go with the people of Bangladesh.
Other Links:- Shahzaman’s Blog