Free and Open Source Software for Disaster Management: A Case Study of Sahana Disaster  Management System of Sri Lanka: a UNESCAP Technical Paper by the Information and Communications Technology and Disaster Risk Reduction Division of UNESCAP - A comprehensive and well-researched insight into Sahana

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.

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.

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.

Sahana are again applying to participate in the Google Summer of Code.
Please help us to develop concrete proposals to ensure a successful application for which students can apply for. We need to have this in by March 13th.

See the Wiki: http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php?id=dev:sahana_gsoc09_ideas

Please contact through the mailing list: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sahana-maindev

The Free and Open Source Software Community of Sri Lanka [FOSS.LK] is hosting the 1^st Annual SAHANA Conference on March 24 & 25, 2009. In its inaugural year, the conference will provide opportunities for anyone involved in Disaster/Emergency management to network and share best practices with each other.

The conference is aptly named SAHANA, meaning “Relief” in Sinhala which is an official language of Sri Lanka, and is named after the “SAHANA Disaster Management System“.

The event will also be followed by a BarCamp on March 26, 2009.

More details about the event can be found here: http://sahana2009.foss.lk/index.html

SahanaPy is a ground-up rewrite of Sahana Phase 2 using Web2Py, which is a MVC web application framework for Rapid Application Development based on Python. The SahanaPy code base also introduces distributed version control with Bazaar - with the main repository currently hosted on Launchpad.

SahanaPy is currently an experimental branch, since rewriting a large, working application is not something to be undertaken lightly. It is a lot of work & the payback at this stage isn’t clear. It is a project started by few Sahana developers changing focus from PHP to Python. Surely this attracts a lot of questions, some of them are addressed on the FAQ section here.

Project page & wiki: http://www.sahanapy.org

Project hosted at Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/sahana

Change is good. Choice is even better So now we have Sahana available in two flavours: PHP & Python, take your pick and ….

“Code for Sahana” !! Because, I do!

Recently I had planned to attend and present Sahana to the students audience at two events in India where the main agenda of my talk was to make them aware of the HFOSS ideology and Sahana, as a part of the community building efforts I have been doing in India.

Being a student myself, I am highly excited to attend such events and make sure I attend them and spread Sahana

First event to attend was GNUnify 09, which was at “Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research“, Pune. It is an annual gathering of the techies & community organised by the SICR & Pune GNU/Linux Users Group. It was a two day event held from 13th - 14th Feb 2009, I was present for the first day. The best take home, apart from excited students interested in taking up work on Sahana as a part of their academics, was a student volunteer coming up and sharing his thoughts on using Sahana to maintain the database of all people related information for the country starting with his city Pune, which can be used to access information in case such an emergency situation arises. As he pointed out, we don’t have a central identity mechanism in India as a national ID, but have various different IDs like the Voter ID, Ration Card, Passport. The student also mentioned they have a group at their college which works on Social issues who might be willing to take up work on Sahana :). Audience here comprised of FOSS Contributors & Professionals, Students, Teachers.

Second event was FOSSKriti, at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur from February 12-15th 2009, where I was for the last 2 days of the event. FOSSKriti is the FOSS component of their annual technical festival called Techkriti which attracts a huge student crowd from across India each year. This place attracted a larger student audience since it was a student only event and the organizers were an awesome bunch since they were students as well!

The slides of the talk:

I am currently working on developing a client application for Sahana, which can also act as a standalone data collecting tool for field reporters and people working in the process of disaster relief & management.

What is Openmoko™?

1.    Openmoko is a Linux distribution designed for open mobile computing platforms, such as, but not limited to, cellphones.
2.    Openmoko is the company behind the Openmoko Linux distribution. Openmoko also manufactures mobile computing platforms, such as the Neo FreeRunner.”

MAIN OBJECTIVES
•    The primary objective of the project is to make use of touch interface based cellphones with Wi-Fi, GPS, and GPRS as an effective disaster reporting & communication tool which interacts with the Sahana main system, either real time or by synchronization when accessible with the device.
•    The project aims at creating a “new application stack” over mobile devices which can be further expanded to provide all the features of the Sahana system, possible on a mobile device.
•    Having a compact and handy mobile device as an assistive tool and as a replacement for PCs/Laptops at relief camps for use in data reporting and information access from the main Sahana system.

A complete detailed proposal that I have drafted is available here in PDF format.

I am also collecting opinions from various domain experts and experienced people to provide suggestions and inputs in the form of a short questionnaire located here.

Please do provide your inputs and suggestions on the same!

Sahana was recently presented at PANACeA at the Earls Regency in Kandy, Sri Lanka, by yours truly. The first thing that struck me at this conference/workshop with a focus on e-health was the name: PANAceA:

PAN Asian Collaboration for Evidence-based eHealth Adoption and Application (PANACeA) is an initiative to generate evidence in the field of eHealth within the Asian context, by forming a network of researchers and research projects from developing Asian countries. PANACeA supports multinational projects to evaluate eHealth solution in the field and generate evidence through methodologically sound research. The evidence acquired through these projects will be scalable and generalisable to othe developing countries. The results will be used to advocate policies on eHealth in Asian countries.

Which is nice, since Panacea is also the goddess of healing in Greek mythology. The participants were quite interested in the system, which was appropriately presented under the Free and Open Source Software session of the workshop. The messaging module of Sahana was also presented separately the next day, within the RTBP project context.