Brain dump by Mark Prutsalis on March 24th 2010
I am in Orlando, Florida, where this morning I accepted an award given to the Sahana Software Foundation for our response to the Haiti earthquake.
The Best Practices award is given annually by PPBI (Public Private Business, Inc.), a not-for-profit corporation with a mission to link the private and public sectors in effective emergency management and disaster recovery planning. The award was presented during this morning’s general session before several hundred attendees of the DRJ Spring World Conference (Disaster Recovery Journal - the largest business continuity planning conference in the US).
This was nice recognition for the efforts of our entire community to assist the victims in Haiti and helped elevate Sahana’s profile with important companies in the disaster recovery and business continuity field.
Photos and a press release are forthcoming and I will forward them through all channels when they are available.
Again, thank you all for your dedication to Sahana and to the victims of disaster. This award and recognition belongs to all of us.
I would also like to thank our Chair Brent Woodworth, who sits on the PPBI board, and nominated Sahana for this honor this year. There were several outstanding nominees for the award this year, and our receiving it really is a testament to how much our efforts are valued.
Brain dump by Mark Prutsalis on March 24th 2010
- The Membership of the Sahana Software Foundation was formed in January. It includes 23 persons who previously served on the Board or Project Management Committee. Our release announcing this can be viewed here: http://wiki.sahanafoundation.org/doku.php/foundation:initial_membership
- Save the Date: The first Meeting of Members and the Board will take place on Sunday, May 2, 2010 in Seattle Washington, co-located with the ISCRAM conference. Details will soon follow. We plan a morning Members meeting, followed by an open mini-conference/symposium in the afternoon - a good opportunity for people to present their Sahana efforts to the Members and interested attendees at ISCRAM.
- CLAs from All Committers and PMC members are required and requested from anyone else contributing either code or ideas to Sahana’s projects. Please see: http://wiki.sahanafoundation.org/doku.php/foundation:start#contributor_license_agreement.
- The Board established the Community Development Committee to oversee internship programs, mentorship opportunities, and programs such as the Google Summer of Code.
- Speaking of which, we have been accepted as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2010!!! Information will be posted here:http://wiki.sahanafoundation.org/doku.php/foundation:sahana_gsoc10. All GSOC announcements will come from our Community Development Committee. Gavin Treadgold and David Bitner are serving as the GSOC Administrators for the Sahana Software Foundation this year. What they say, goes.
- You may have heard that the Board has adopted formal naming conventions for all Sahana projects. Each project should start working on coming up with a creative and appropriate name. See http://wiki.sahanafoundation.org/doku.php/foundation:project_names
- The Board will soon formally establish by resolution the technical projects of the Sahana Software Foundation - one for the PHP project and one for the Python project. At the same time, we will also be establishing a Standards and Interoperability Project, which will be responsible for promoting the use of open standards and interoperability between Humanitarian FOSS projects - including and especially the Sahana technical projects. There has been lots of productive discussion on this the past few days. Please let me know if you’d like to be involved on this committee.
- You may have noticed that we have recently migrated our website and wiki from the sahana.lk domain to the sahanafoundation.org domain. All old links should automatically redirect. Please report any problems to admin@sahanafoundation.org
- All project infrastructure sites will soon move to a subdomain of the sahanafoundation.org domain. We will do this migration in coordination with new names being decided by the community and Project Management Committees.
- We are setting up Sahana as a Super Project on Launchpad and will soon migrate all of our code bases there under a single banner. This will take some time to set up as we’ll need to use the new project names to set up the sub-projects.
- We had a really successful deployment for Haiti using SahanaPy; our organization registry, request management system and hospital management system were all quickly stood up and provided data feeds in several formats. This served an important and valued gap-filling resource for the first several weeks of the earthquake response. This response really cemented Sahana’s reputation as a leader in Humanitarian FOSS.
- In late January, I was part of a team that travelled to Miami to support US SOUTHCOM as part of multi-project effort - including InSTEDD, Ushahidi, FortiusOne, Open Solutions Group, Mindtel, Crisis Commons and NDU/Star-Tides. We worked on an open source medical supply system based on Sahana’s Hospital Management System and the EDXL-HAVE standard. While never deployed in Haiti, we have hopes that this system might be utilized in future disasters. In addition, as a result of this mission, Sahana’s Haiti portal was made accessible on an iframe within the US APAN collaboration site - that serves as a non-classified space where US military responders can share information with UN agencies, NGOs and other relief agencies.
- I am very proud that Sahana members helped shape discussion over standards for hospital data - using EDXL-HAVE - and missing/found persons data - using PFIF. I must thanks David Bitner for joining me in several conference calls with other technology providers, UN agencies, US Government agencies and others and being a strong voice for advocating open standards.
- In late January, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) approached us to provide support for the food cluster in Haiti, and we have been working on a funded project basis for them since the beginning of February. This project is scheduled to go on through May or June of this year.
- In late February, Connie White and I participated in the Naval Postgraduate School’s Concept Based Experimentation in Avon Park, Florida. We planned some future experiments with Carnegie Mellon University to utilize their mesh networking system over handheld radios to carry Sahana data. We also planned out a long-term plan for future experiments as part of RELIEF experiments hosted by NPS at Camp Roberts.
- After the earthquake in Chile, we stood up a portal based on our most recent PHP code, but have mostly remained in standby as international assistance has not been requested by the national authorities and the scale of the response required was much smaller than for Haiti, despite the earthquake being measured to be much larger.
Brain dump by dilantha on August 20th 2009
As Niranga mentioned in previous post our main goal was to remove the side menu bars and give some more room for the content. So now you can see there is more space left in the content than earlier.We can use it display the content more clearly or to add more functionalities.
Here are some screen shots of the new theme
Still we publish this as a demo version. There are lot more functionalities to be added. So we are kindly request you to visit the site and give us your ideas about this theme .It will be really helpful for us to improve the quality of this. we have already received some comments and new ideas to improve the theme from various people in sahana community . Those will be considered when developing the second phase of the theme and we will start it nearly in the future.. 
Brain dump by Ajay Kumar on June 23rd 2009
Sourceforge has announced the finalists for the SourceForge 2009 Community Choice Awards and Sahana has been selected as a finalist in the “Best Project for Government” category.
Two things:
1. Please go and Vote now for Sahana. Vote here!
2. Help spread the word out & get others to vote for Sahana! 
Brain dump by Mark Prutsalis on June 15th 2009
I had the opportunity to present Sahana to the CrisisCamp Ignite session on June 12, 2009. The presentation, with narration, can be found on my slideshare site. Download the entire powerpoint show rather than viewing it through slideshare to hear the voiceover.
About Crisis Camp: “CrisisCamp DC started with one idea: How can technology help people around the world during times and places of crisis? CrisisCamp DC is part of a global movement who is bringing together volunteers, academia, non-profits, companies and government officials to share best practices and lessons learned to advocate for further use of technology and telecommunications to assist citizens and communities during crisis.”
Sahana definitely has a large role to play in follow-up from Crisis Camp.
There are major opportunities and major object lessons for Sahana that came out of the weekend. The first is that there was a consensus that “Good tools do not require training; If you to train people on it, it’s not good enough.” Those interested in improving the user experience and front-end of Sahana take note; this should be a priority for post 1.0 development.
A second relates to the abundance of excellent new tools available - especially in GIS - and Sahana should not be competing with these systems, but integrating with them. Packaging Sahana with Open Street Map can provide a total downloadable open-source solution, but we should not abandon potential commercial partnerships – such as with ESRI, which offers a free viewer and sells a single server license for an affordable price for most organizations and jurisdictions. Also take a look at Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS.
A number of potential opportunities were discussed to exercise, test, simulate disasters to road test tools, and especially interoperability, including a “hack-i-stan” exercise for such a purpose to discover requirements and task developers to come up with solutions. Sahana should also be an active participant in such an endeavor.
You can follow Crisis Camp activities in a number of ways. Twitter: @crisiscamp or search hashtag #crisiscamp; a ning site and a wiki have already been set up for follow-up activities. Sign up and get involved.
Brain dump by mifan on May 26th 2009
Interesting concept from the World Food Program who looks to use micro-blogging as a major means of information transfer - CipCip, inspired by Twitter, is a micro-blogging platform for humanitarian relief operations. According to the WFP Deliver project, which focuses on the delivery of information:
“Please welcome CipCip (pronounce “TJEEP-TJEEP”, Italian for Twitter) to the DELIVER family”
So how does this differ from Twitter? This statement sheds some light:
“CipCip, is like Twitter, but internal to our organisation. Access is restricted, and new users are added by invite-only at this time.”
And it focuses solely on humanitarian relief messages etc. Restricts the message getting out to the masses, like what Twitter does, and rather makes sure the message stays within the organization - seems to be Twitter with user permissions. And it is being used, according to WFP:
“Already we have had our first user ‘Ciping’ from Maputo, Mozambique. We have live streamed meetings so that we could remain working our desks while one of our team ‘Cip’d’ updates.“
Yet another innovation for the humanitarian domain.
Brain dump by Ajay Kumar on May 25th 2009
This is the last week to nominate your favorite open source project for the Source Forge Community Choice Awards. So if you are a supporter of the Sahana project, please show your support by nominating us.
Suggested categories:
- Best Project
- Best Project for Developers
- Best Project for Government
- Best Project for Academia
- Most likely to change the way you do everything
Please click on the image above to nominate or follow this link.
Brain dump by Mark Prutsalis on April 24th 2009
The Gartner Group’’s Roberta Witty recently blogged on Sahana in “Sahana: A Free, Open Source Disaster Relief Management System” following a conference call I participated in with her this past Tuesday along with fellow Sahana transition board members Brent Woodworth and Mifan Careem. It’s a nice write-up from an influential source - the Gartner Group is the premier analysis and research authority in the IT industry - that I hope will help spread the word about Sahana’s benefits and bring more contributors into the community from the emergency management field. An excerpt follows:
Sometimes the best things in life are still free, and good news can come from surprising sources. On Tuesday, Rick DeLotto and I were briefed by the Sahana Project, an award winning, free and open source, web-based disaster relief management system designed to “Help alleviate human suffering and help save lives through the efficient use of IT during a disaster”. It was first developed by the open source community, and is maintained by volunteers, with support from IBM, Google, NSF and Sida. You should run right over to Sahana and get a look at it, tell your friends, and spread the word. It might be just what your home town needs to keep YOU safe.
Brain dump by bitner on April 21st 2009
Sahana Community,
It is my pleasure to announce the students who will be participating in this years Google Summer of Code for Sahana. We received 45 applicants from eight different countries this year for only 10 spots. I would like to personally congratulate both those who we are able to bring into the GSoC program as well as all the other applicants as the field of candidates was truly outstanding. We look forward to working with these students throughout the summer and hope to form relationships that last for years to come for Sahana and the Humanitarian ICT communities. We thank all the students who have applied for this program and apologize that we were only able to accept such a limited number.
The following students have been accepted for this years program:
Kethees Selladurai
Ajay Kumar
Khushbu Mohta
Praneeth Bodduluri
Gihan Chamara
Hasanat Kazmi
Shree Kent Bohra
Nithin Dara
Iroshan Horathalge
Akshit Sharma
Descriptions of these projects can be found at http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/sahana.
Thank you,
David Bitner
Sahana PMC
Sahana Google Summer of Code Administrator
Brain dump by Mark Prutsalis on March 21st 2009
Before jetting off the Colombo this weekend for the first annual Sahana software for disaster management conference, I want to provide an update on the input and ideas collected for the Sahana 1.0 release. I am personally a bit behind schedule myself on managing this, and for that I apologize.
However, I would like as much as possible to try to keep to the schedule I posted on the wiki which allows through the end of April to make a technical and strategic plan for what’s going into the release and what’s not. So, I would welcome any additional suggestions and thoughts as to what should be included in the 1.0 release. Please continue to send them in to the sahana-user or sahana-maindev mailing lists. I have a feeling some other ideas and discussions on this may take place in Colombo next week, so I will keep the list open through next week. This is definitely on my personal agenda to discuss at the BarCamp.
Anyway, here’s the list of ideas – most are new and some are adjustments to others already noted in some form on the wiki already:
- Merging of bug-fixes and enhancements from China / Sichuan deployment (for 1.0)
- Staff deployment and other enhancements from NYC deployment (for 1.1+)
- Make an RC branch off of trunk past 0.6.2.2 branch to capture many enhancements made for the 1.0 release – let release team work on it to capture bug fixes for trunk from other branches.
- Review list of bug fixes required for proposed 1.0 branch and trunk, and update tracker accordingly, such that experimental development can continue towards features planned for 1.1+ releases (currently noted as 0.7 and 0.8 on the wiki – plus GSOC 2009 projects).
- Windows and other supported OS installers to include as much auto configuration as possible and easy to follow prompts where user input is needed to set-up Sahana
- Document the installation package creation process on the wiki such that future release teams can follow it.
- Complete third party library review
- include the LGPL license text in the base directory of the package
I think that was it. Let me know if you think I missed anything; and please do feel free to send additional suggestions through next week.
