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

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!

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…

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.