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…

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

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

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.

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.

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.