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…

An interesting article I came across recently describes the use of Internet traffic counters to track “web hits” in order to determine earthquake locations, according to NewScientistTech. Thus based on the surge in ‘Hits’ for a certain geographic area per unit time, it can be determined to some extent that something has taken place in the region - in this case, an earthquake. The study is carried out based on usage statistics of European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre. Again, social networking to the rescue…

Multiple user groups,Industry and FOSS/GIS communities started an effort to develop/customize Sahana for the recent disaster in Myanmar (Cyclone Nargis). The whole effort started based on a three day (3-5 June) conference call and a user training held by some of the Sahana community members.

This Team (or rather group) consist of a number of locals/International volunteers, Humanitarians, and representatives of IBM US/Aus, InSTEDD,LSF, Respere and OpenStreetMap.

Team decided to do the customization based on the last stable release of Sahana (which is 0.6.2) and incorporate some of the important features (specially GIS functionality including TMS support for OpenStreetMap) from the unstable release. This will be a definite challenge for the developers to merge some of the bleeding edge code with relatively old code, while maintaining the stability on the whole application.

As an outcome of these discussions, there was a request from the team to have a separate CVS branch for this customization. Based on the CVS convention, I managed to find the time to create a new deployment branch for this, known as ‘dep_0_6_2_myanmar’. This branch can be obtained by anyone (as anonymous user) by issuing following,

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@sahana.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/sahana co -r dep_0_6_2_myanmar -P sahana-phase2



Sahana project perspective, this is going to be a major push for releasing another stable version of the application soon. The six month old current stable application needs another release.

Choice: an important thing, especially if you’re short of time and other valuable resources, especially during crisis situations. I mentioned sometime back that the goal of the SahanaGIS work was to allow existing GIS users, using existing technologies, to make use of the system without disrupting the flow:The GIS catalog is an important part of this..

The Sahana GIS catalog is an administrative module within Sahana that allows users to configure geographical data/feeds. It attempts to provide users with a somewhat intuitive interface to configure various layers, which in turn can be viewed by the Sahana GIS client which uses OpenLayers. Support for newer ‘types’ of layers/feeds are added frequently: our goal is to support quite a few of these in the near future.

At the time of writing, the following are configurable and thus usable from within Sahana: OpenStreetMap (both Mapnik and Osmarenderer), remote and local TMS layers, remote and local WMS layers, Commercial Mapping APIs: GoogleMaps, YahooMaps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Multimap, and feeds: GeoRSS and KML. The files layer can be used to upload and use the following: KML, GML, OSM. WMS and TMS layers accept multiple layers within them. Layers can be enabled by the administrator so that they are visible within the OL mapping client by default. This works perfectly for data from custom mapping servers: either local or remote. Maps served as WMS via mapping servers such as UMN/Mapserver can be accessed by configuring the WMS layer in the GIS catalog. Likewise, tiles from TileCache and the likes can be accessed by configuring TMS to point to them. In turn, the configured layers are displayed within the mapping client, depending on their visibility settings. There are a lot of items on the roadmap as well: including WFS support… Check out the Sahana GIS Infrastructure Roadmap to see what we’re upto…

Google has released its revolutionary mapping client, Google Earth, for web-browsers, according to Google LatLong

Today, I’m happy to announce the release of the new Google Earth Browser Plug-in, which brings the full power of Google Earth to the web, embeddable within your own web site. Driven by an extensive JavaScript API, you can control the camera; create lines, markers, and polygons; import 3D models from the web and overlay them anywhere on the planet.

However, as is the case with many Google applications (including Google Earth for some time), us Linux users have to wait - again. The technology is currently available to Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 6/7 on MS Windows only. However, I guess this move will create a lot of interest - Google Maps API certainly did - add 3D ability to that now, and imagine the possibilities !

We used Google Maps API within Sahana as the primary plugin for GIS. We now concentrate on having OpenLayers as the main mapping client, allowing a host of services to be accessed through it, including the GoogleMaps API. So once the Linux/Mac ports are done, I wonder if and when OpenLayers support for GE would be on the roadmap..

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.

“Why the Sunflower”, was a question I have heard many times. Specifically, why did and why does Sahana use the Sunflower as the official mascot: well, it can’t really be a mascot, but its not a logo either, as yet. Anyways, as far as I can remember, here goes:

Phase 1 was a time of constructive chaos in Sahana. We had around 80 developers working on a mashup of Sahana, termed phase1, which I’ll elaborate in a later post. Anyway, the time had come to name the software, which was appropriately and beautifully named Sahana, meaning Relief in Sinhala, a language of Sri Lanka. The next task was of course to come up with some sort of an image depicting Sahana, to be used in the web banner of the application software: I can remember the first banner having 2 images: A white dove and a Sunflower. Later version saw the dissapearence of the White Dove, and the Sunflower took over from there in all its majesty and grandeur.

Surprisingly, the Sunflower is more than appropriate to symbolize Sahana. As Dr. Francisco mentioned in the Sahana lists, “The sunflower is a symbol of hope, while the flower itself personifies the sun as a life-giving celestial entity”. It also symbolizes power, warmth and nourishment, particularly features attributed to the Sun: and rightly so: The word sunflower comes from the Greek ‘Helianthus’ : ‘Helios’ meaning ‘sun’ and ‘anthos’ meaning flower.
FTD paints a much more interesting picture: Legend tells that the Greek sun-god Helios was drowned by his uncles, the Titans, and then raised to the sky, where he became the sun. He was beloved by a mortal named Clytie, who died of her love for him. Clytie was “rooted” in her grief, and thus followed Helios’ daily journey through the sky. But, in yet another legend, it is said that Clytie, who fell in love with the God of the Sun Apollo, was a water-nymph. She was so much in love that she would sit on the ground and stare up at the sun all day long: but, Apollo never noticed her. The other Gods took pity on her and turned her into a sunflower: her legs became the sunflower’s stem, whilst her face became the flower, her golden hair the petals….Even in the form of a sunflower Clytie continues to watch her love and that is why the sunflower’s face turns to follow the path of the sun.

The sunflower’s turning as it follows the sun symbolizes deep loyalty and constancy. It is said that if a girl puts three sunflower seeds down her back, she will marry the first boy she meets. The Chinese hold the sunflower as a symbol of longevity. Incan priestesses wore large sunflower disks made of gold on their garments. In the Andes mountains, images of sunflowers were hammered into gold and placed in temples. Sunflower seeds were a sacred food to the Plains Indians in the prairie regions of North America. They placed bowls filled with sunflower seeds on the graves of their dead to nourish them on the long journey to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

And of course, the sunflower contains spirals, where the number of left spirals and the number of right spirals are successive Fibonacci Numbers!!!

Whatever the sunflower stands for, it is majestic. And a fitting image for a fitting project. Now, where is that girl with the sunflower seeds..?

Agreed. Its been long overdue, but finally its here: the Sahana blog. As to the slogan, I was confused too.. Is this unofficially the official blog for Sahana? Who made it official? Well, that’s unofficial. Then again, who said it was not officially the unofficial blog? I certainly didn’t. But am I official enough to make an official statement as such? I guess not? Am I at least official enough to make an unofficial statement as such? I guess so, but I’m starting to have serious doubts! But calling it the unofficial unofficial sahana blog wouldn’t have made things clearer either. The latter would be like when the English professor said “In English, unlike in other languages, a positive and a positive always makes a positive”, to which the student in the back row yawned saying “yeah, right!”.

Anyways, now that we are sufficiently confused, I declare this blog open with its first clear post. My goal is to invite other bloggers to share their thoughts on that great piece of software: Sahana, and all other related stuff, humanitarian ICT software, FOSS for humanitarian efforts, technology to save lives and all its kin. We’ll be talking about official stuff, unofficial stuff and anything in between.

So, make way for the Unofficial Sahana blog, or vice versa, or vice versa screwed into itself: all in all, lets talk Sahana…