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Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System

http://freshmeat.net/projects/sahana/ http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/sahana http://www.sahana.lk

name: Chamindra de Silva email: chamindra@opensource.lk R&D Manager, Virtusa (www.virtusa.com) Acting Director, Lanka Software Foundation (www.opensource.lk)

Table of Contents The Historic Trigger..............................................................................................................3 Why is the Response to Large Scale Disasters so Chaotic?..............................................3 The Need for Information and Information Technology in a Disaster..................................3 Introducing the Sahana Disaster Management System.........................................................4 Alignment to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)........................................................8 Humanitarian-FOSS Concept and Awards............................................................................9 The Sahana Core Team and Community.............................................................................10 Application of Sahana in Sri Lanka, Post-Asian Tsunami 2004.........................................10 Application of Sahana in Pakistan, Post-Asian Quake 2005...............................................12 Lessons Learned from the Asian Tsunami and Asian Quake ............................................12 Recognition of Sahana and Humanitarian-FOSS................................................................13 Sahana Phase II Status.........................................................................................................14 Sahana Websites and Documentation.................................................................................16 Sahana Future Plan .............................................................................................................16 Other References:................................................................................................................18

The Historic Trigger


The Tsunami that hit Sri Lanka on December 26th resulted in a massive outpouring of support for the relief of the nearly one million people that have been affected by it. When literally thousands of people from every conceivable multilateral organization, civil society and from many other places arrived here to help, it became clear immediately that without information technology it would be impossible to coordinate their efforts to maximize the impact on the affected people. Thus the Sahana project was born. Despite the tremendous value this type of software can bring to disaster management, there are only very few systems that exist today and none of them are widely deployed. In fact, the most widely used system appears to be non-Web based and using completely out-dated technology. While there are indeed various specialized parts that exist, there does not exist a single cohesive system that organizations such as United Nations Disaster Assistance and Coordination (UNDAC) deploys at every disaster situation they go to. Thus the Sahana Free and Open Source (FOSS) Disaster Management System was born, built amidst the chaos by volunteers of I.T engineers predominantly from the Sri Lankan IT industry and was officially used to track families and relief organizations during after the Tsunami in Sri Lanka. Today Sahana continues to be enhanced by a global community of 60+ contributors with the objective of globalizing the solution and suite of applications to handle any type of large scale disaster.

Why is the Response to Large Scale Disasters so Chaotic?


The distinction to be made in the recent 2004-2005 natural disasters such as the Tsunami, Asian Quake or Hurricane Katrina, is the massive scale of devastation. We are often talking about over a million people being affected within very short span of time. Additionally these are disasters that wipe out transport, communications and local emergency management infrastructure (like the police, hospitals or fire brigades). Even the richest nations are thus surprising left in a similar state of chaos as their poor counterparts who had very little of the emergency management infrastructure in the first place. Irrespective, even if this infrastructure was left intact, the scale can still greatly overwhelm the local resources available to handle those emergencies. Thus the response needs to be quickly supplemented with foreign/local donations, support of the civil society and often the victims themselves (as the first-responders in helping each other) to stand a chance of handling the scale of the situation. All these groups and individuals need to be empowered and need to coordinate complementary to each other in order to be effective. This is where the problem lies. Though often the support can be quite forth coming there is a lot of chaos in coordinating all groups to operate as one and tracking all the victims needs in responding to the disaster. As a result you have a wastage of pledged support, imbalances in aid distribution and a lack of proper coverage of support and services.

The Need for Information and Information Technology in a Disaster


To the person who does not have much experience with Disaster Management the IT requirements might seem like the last thing you attend to when a disaster happens. Doesn't medical aid, food and shelter come first? To analyze this lets first take the T out of IT and talk just about information. Getting the right information in these scenarios is critical to alleviating human suffering and saving lives. Think about

the mother wailing and desperately searching until she finds the where abouts of her missing child; think about orphaned children traumatized waiting for a familiar face of their extended family to find them; think about the people starving and needing aid because their whereabouts have got lost in the chaos; think about camps waiting for the right medical supplies to treat the people within; think about the relief coordinators who have to make guesses as to where the limited relief goes and in what quantity. The unseen devil in these situations is in the scale of operation and in being able to account for each an every individual equally from their medical needs to reunification with family to their relief supply, which amounts to a whole lot of data. That is where information technology helps manage information. Through IT the right data can be shared and accessed instantaneously by gov offices, field operatives, the civil society, victims acquaintances and the victims themselves to enhance the relief effort. Ironically the government especially in developed nations often have in-house solutions that could handle certain aspects of the disaster management, such as tracking people. Unfortunately those systems and the data they contain are often protected and by policy cannot be shared with external groups such as NGOs or any ol' volunteer who wants to help, thus it ceases to be the consolidated solution for everyone. Additionally the government owned, command and control procedures and systems in such an instance can sometimes get in the way (due to the lack of resources on the ground) and it can prevent independent relief groups and volunteers from directly and immediately helping the victims. Yet at the same time everyone needs to be coordinated well and information needs to be shared to allow all relief entities to operate as one, such that the aid and services can be distributed effectively. This is where a centralized collaboration portal for all relief groups (including the government) provides a lot of value. And that is where information technology plays an important role, in the ability to manage the scale of information and to improve accessibility to that information to all groups. Ultimately we want to make sure every man, women and child is being accounted for and the relief to everyone is swift and timely. And for all I know during the Tsunami and Pakistan quake no complete solutions were put available to address a lot of these coordination problems.

Introducing the Sahana Disaster Management System


Sahana is a suite a web based applications that provides that address different problems with regard to the information required for managing certain coordination problems during post-disaster.

Problem 1: Helping Families and Next of Kin Find Each Other


The objective here is to reduce the trauma caused by waiting to be found and to help connect families and acquaintances quickly in order for them to support each other. The trauma damage is especially acute for children waiting for loved ones to find them. For example in Sri Lanka there were 100s of bulletin boards with pictures of missing people being pinned on them. Physically reviews say about 100,000s of such pictures to find someone is going to take quite a while. Here IT can help with an on line bulletin board where you can search by name, appearance, age group. Even if the victims or families do not have access themselves it is quite easy for any authorized NGO/civil society group to hook up to the central portal and provide that service in the areas they are operating in.

Solution 1: Sahana Missing Person Registry The Missing person registry is an online bulletin board of missing and found people. It not only captures information about the people missing and found, but the information of the person seeking them is also captured, which adds to the chances of people finding each other. For example if two members of the a family unit is looking for the head of the family, we can use this data at least to connect those two family members.

Features include:

Meta data around the individual such identity numbers, visual appearance, last seen location, status, etc Sounds-like name search (using metafore and soundex algorithms) Uploading of a persons picture Grouping by family unit or other groups types

Problem 2: Coordinating All Aid Groups and Helping Them to Operate Effectively As One.
For the Tsunami we had a massive outpouring of support from INGOs, NGOs and the general civil society setup to help the victims. In Sri Lanka I believe we had about 300+ NGOs registered providing support. If all groups are not coordinated effectively it results in problems such as clogged up supply routes, competition for providing support in some areas whilst other areas suffer a dearth of support, double vaccinations and mis expectations. As a result all that goodwill and aid pledged will go wasted and under-utilized. However this can be an overwhelm coordination task for authorized emergency controller to do manually. An IT solution can help here where you have an organization registry where we keep track of who is doing what where and more importantly where nothing is being done at all (or there is no coverage of a certain service). This way they could even self-distribute themselves evenly across affected region just by being aware what other relief groups are doing.

Solution 2: Sahana Organization Registry


The Organization Registry keeps track of all the relief organizations and civil society groups working in the disaster region. It captures not only the places where they are active, but also captures information on the range of services they are providing in each area.

Features include:

Capturing a comprehensive list of meta data on an relief organization and all the activities they have in the region Registering ad-hoc volunteers willing to contribute Capturing the essential services each group is providing and where Reporting on the converge of services and support in the region and more importantly where there are no aid services being provided

Problem 3: Capturing the Location of All Temporary Camps and Shelters


A temporary shelter or a camp can be just about anything. It ranges from a large government run camps to schools to a house. Regardless of the type of camp we need to capture information of where they are located and how many people are in them to be able to know how to distribute aid effectively. Camps off the beaten path or those that are inaccessible can often get omitted in aid distribution, so here IT can help to ensure that such camps are being represented and reported.

Solution 3: The Sahana Camps Registry


This sub application of Sahana keeps track of the location of all the camps in the region and the some basic data on the facilities they might have and the number of

people in them. It also provides a GIS view to plot the location of the camps in the affected area.

Current features include:


Tracking of basic meta-data on the location, facilities and size of the camp Integration of google maps to provide a GIS view of the affected region Ability to customize the list of important facilities needed at a camp Basic reports on the camps and drill-down by region

Problem 4: Effectively Utilizing the Pledges of Aid


During the Tsunami that was an unprecedented response in terms of aid and supplies, however even 8 months after the Tsunami we find a lot of those pledges of aid are not utilized. The main reason for this is that there is a lack of awareness and visibility to the aid available between those that require to those that can provide it. For example one NGO might get a specific request for aid, however probably only one of 100s of NGOs actually have a supply of that aid item. It would be impractical for this NGO to check with all those 100s of potential places to see if that item is available. Instead what we need is a well structured central repository of aid being pledged and the a track of requests for aid. An IT system should additional help intelligently match these two items.

Solution 4: Sahana Request Management System


The Sahana request management system is a central online repository where all relief organizations, relief works, government agents and camps can effectively match requests of aid and supplies to pledges of support. It effectively looks like an online aid trading system tracking request to fulfillment.

Features include:

Basic meta data on the request and pledges such as the category, the units, contact details and the status Customizable category of aid Filtered search of aid pledges and requests Ability to track partial fulfillment of the request

Reference:

http://www.linux.lk/~chamindra/docs/Sahana-Brochure.pdf

Alignment to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)


There are multiple reasons why Free and Open Source software find a natural fit for humanitarian-ICT applications in general (for which disaster management is but one) and why there seem to be limited propitiatory options available. They are:

Very few countries and organizations today can afford to invest a lot of resources in disaster management when there is no disaster present. While this is obviously true of poor, developing nations, it is also true of richer, developed countries as well because there are always higher priority items that need the funding. A FOSS approach provides a low budget, volunteer supplement and global way to build such systems There is not much commercial interest in developing solutions in this domain as often during humanitarian disasters software licenses are given freely and it almost seems unethical to restrict software. With FOSS there need not even be any delays in getting permission for a license as anyone as the

freedom to download the software and use it.

Also such system should be shared, developed and owned globally as the problems they address are all too common for any country dealing with a disaster. Effectively It should become a global public good. The FOSS development and community mechanisms have a proven track record to build such goods. The global community of IT volunteers who can contribute their goodwill to such causes by using their skills to develop and customize FOSS software for the disaster situations As in conflict situations, during disasters segregation arises between Gov and NGOs, NGOs and INGOs and worse relief groups and people. The main reason I believe is the urgent circumstances in this instance. So an open and transparent and globally owned system is more likely to be trusted to mediate between the groups Finally no two disasters are alike. There are often localizations and customizations needed for the software before before it can get applied effectively to the disasters. Some of these localizations include adding additional meta-data around the entities in the system or translating the system to handle entry in a particular language. With FOSS, the code is available for anyone to quickly pickup and make the needful customizations without restriction.

Going the open source way can address the above concerns and using the open source development model, it is possible to develop this software at a much reduced cost compared to pure commercial development models. Thus if there was a small team which was driving such a project ensuring the quality of the product, then it is possible to get a lot of assistance from the global IT community to make those systems truly exceptional. This is what we see with the Sahana project, which has a core team of 6 people that has built a global community of 60+ participants and contributors. And the FOSS community spirit, philosophy and mechanisms has been a key ingredient in the the successful growth of such a vibrant community for Sahana.

Humanitarian-FOSS Concept and Awards


The above alignment to FOSS was generalized and named humanitarian-FOSS, which is effectively the application of free and open source software to alleviate human suffering was inspired by the a FOSS disaster management project Sahana. This concept finds a natural home not just in disaster management, but in a superset that extends to humanitarian ICT or any other ICT requirement which concerns the improvement of human welfare. We found that the currently taxonomies of projects on well known open source repositories like sourceforge or freshmeat does not presently allow us to bucket such project easily and often get dropped into a misc classification bucket. However we believe there is a lot of potential for growth in this area and if positioned and promoted well they should be many volunteers flocking to build and contribute to such projects globally, especially as the open source community operates with a strong set of ethics for the benefit of the community at large. The concept is somewhat recognized by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) where such ideals are a specialization of the FSF goals to "help thy neighbor with software", where here it is help alleviate human suffering with software. The FSF has created a new award for social benefit that was inspired by the Sahana project. reference:

http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/05/11/05/0553230.shtml http://www.fsf.org/news/social-benefit-award.html

The Sahana Core Team and Community


The development model adopted since Sahana phase I, which was entirely bazaar and volunteer driven is a hybrid model. The new phase II model has a core team ensuring the quality and stability of the Sahana releases surrounded by a bazaar community, which is very similar to the development model for Mozilla firefox. The core team of 6 people is sponsored and run by SIDA and the Lanka Software Foundation a FOSS R&D NPO in Sri Lanka. Currently the majority of development happens in Sri Lanka, whilst the majority of the global community of over 60 members contributes in various areas from deployment, testing, humanitarian/emergency management domain direction, XHTML/CSS design, database research, etc. The community includes from emergency management experts, humanitarian consultants, academic and FOSS developers currently all working towards the success of the Sahana system. Participation is global with the leading contributions from Sri Lanka, UK, US, Australia and New Zealand. This community will and later to generalize to any application in this domain. Apart of the individual community members that belong to various organizations and initiatives (e.g. ISCRAM, UN WFP, ASF and OSI ), formal support at organization level currently comes from the IBM crisis team and the Lanka Software Foundation. reference:

http://www.sahana.lk/wiki/doku.php?id=dev:team http://groups.yahoo.com/group/humanitarian-ict/ http://www.opensource.lk (Lanka Software Foundation) http://www-1.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/offering/bcrs/a1000265

Application of Sahana in Sri Lanka, Post-Asian Tsunami 2004


Developing a disaster management solution immediately after a disaster was probably not the best time to do it. Still there was nothing else on offer for the Sri Lankan government to use and thus after 3 weeks they adopted to the system as part of their official portal for the CNO (Center of National Operations). It was developed as a Sourceforge project ( a well know open source software development portal ) and about 40+ volunteers contributed to it's development from various groups and companies. An implementation of Sahana was authorized and deployed by CNO (The main government body in Sri Lanka coordinating the relief effort) to help coordinate all the data being captured and at the end of their tenure it had captured data on 32,000+ families and pretty much all the NGO operating in the Tsunami in Sri Lanka. The latter was entered and coordinated by the CHA. The Sahana phase I system was built as collection of interconnected, yet independently usable, subsystems that interact with each other via a set of shared databases. The separate concerns and related components of the Sahana system implement for Phase I were: Component Organization registry Description Keeps track of all organizations and the role +

Component Request management system Camp registry People registry

Description ownership areas they have in the relief effort. Database of all requests for support from various locations (camps, hospitals, etc), as well as offers of support from relief providers. Registers all temporary camps, hospitals and locations setup to house the victims of the disaster Database of missing, displaced, dead, orphans etc. (including pictures, finger prints, DNA samples) with advanced search capabilities. Database of all pledges of assistance and attempts to match it to the requests. Also records where the assistance was provided. A collection of key contacts for critical areas during a disaster.

Assistance management system Key contacts database

The main systems that were utilized were the Organization registry and the People registry whilst the others were used to a lesser extent. The deployment model included distributed data entry of Gramasevaka data and police data and there were authorized volunteers given access to upload the data into the system coordinated by the universities. Sahana was also loaded on laptops to capture data in the field, however these systems were not deployed due to certain constraints. Overall the deployment model is depicted in the diagram below:

The technology stack used to build Sahana was based on the well known Open Source solution stack, LAMP. This included Debian GNU/Linux for the OS, Apache for the web server, MySQL for the database, and PHP/Java for the Web Application, which makes it pretty much free and open source end-to-end. As the hardware resource requirements of this solution stack is low it was initial deployed on a

standard desktop machine, but subsequently migrated to it own dedicated IBM We also tested and found that it could be deployed on a resource limited PDA such as the iPAQ with OPIE ( a GNU/Linux distro supporting iPAQs) within 64 Mb of RAM. References:

http://www.who.int/entity/hac/events/tsunamiconf/presentations/2_17_private _sector_woodworth_doc.pdf

Application of Sahana in Pakistan, Post-Asian Quake 2005


After the Asian quake, the LSF Sahana team was invited to Pakistan by the IBM Crisis team and IBM Pakistan. This recommendation was based on the experiences of deploying Sahana in Sri Lanka. The Lanka Software Foundation funded the tickets for two individuals to localize Sahana and train the teams there to deploy the system. The government authorized NADRA to be the custodian of all relief management system and the LSF, IBM Pakistan and IBM crisis worked with them to train them on customizing Sahana for use in the Asian quake in addition to providing some leadership on the type of applications that would be useful. Since the Phase II system was not ready yet, Phase I was pre-configured by LSF to cover the provinces and villages in the affected region. Subsequently to ease deployment a liveCD was created base on the Taprobane distro (http://www.taprobane.org) to make it very easy to install. NADRA had a comprehensive people database as they build and maintain the central system that maintains the registration of people (identity card, passport, etc) in Pakistan, however the system is not web based and under tight security controls. Thus Sahana filled the gap of making the data accessible to the other organizations involved in the relief effort such as the NGOs. Apart from that NADRA does not have the equivalent of the request management system and organization registry. Following the training by the LSF team, NADRA took ownership of integrating and deploying Sahana in Pakistan, however there has not been any new of results from this to date. So the results on the success of the deployment are still pending. We have heard multiple reports that NADRA is using Sahana, albeit a customized version of it that is integrated to their existing infrastructure. However NADRA themselves, will probably not officially admit to this as they seem to have a policy of secrecy in terms of the systems deployed within their infrastructure. Reference:

http://www.reliefsource.org/foss/index.php/Use:Asian-Earthquake-OCT-2005 http://www.earthquakepakistan.com/images/IBM_CRT_Pakistan_Mission_Re port.pdf

Lessons Learned from the Asian Tsunami and Asian Quake


The following captures some key lessons learned from deploying Sahana in the Asian Tsunami in Sri Lanka and Asian Quake in Pakistan

1. Get the system authorized by the authorized relief coordinators


We need to reduce data silos and redundancy (no matter how good those solutions are) and get everyone to operate as one using one dataset. There is no better way to do this than have the authorized relief coordinators (usually from the government) authorize the deployment of a disaster management solution. Especially when the government does this, all the departments will follow suite. Sahana was deployed

officially by a government entity in Sri Lanka called the CNO. Sahana is being customized for the Pakistan Quake by NADRA an authorized government entity the government.

2. Build open systems where all relief groups can work together
Any disaster management portal that prevents access to NGOs or civil society or government is a partial solution and yet another parallel silo of data. The parallel silos of data can tend to cause more confusion as no proper data consolidation can take place. In Sri Lanka a move was to host the NGO coordinating authority within the Government's C&C operation, however in Pakistan the government entity responsible for deploying the software seemed reluctant to share it with NGOs (due to their existing policies and security controls).

3. Immediately organize dedicated teams to provide localization, customization and helpdesk services
Thought the Sri Lankan Tsunami requirement was served by a bunch of volunteers working bazaar style, this probably is not the best model to use when customizing and supporting Sahana for deployment in the disaster situation. Disaster environments have requirements and deadlines that are needed ASAP. Every disaster yields different requirements and no matter how well you build your system, there will always be urgent requirements on localization, customization and helpdesk application support. Thus when deploying Sahana it is better to get a dedicated professional team to support it. It is also worthwhile setting up a helpdesk/call center to help users get accustomed to the application and enter data on their behalf (especially in nations with a low IT literacy). In Sri Lanka this was not planned for and though the goodwill volunteer effort generated the application they could not always be relied up to provide 24x7 support.

4. Allow for the evolving granularity of data


Where some of the existing coordination systems like logistics management system s fail in disaster management is in being able to handle the evolving granularity of data. If such systems were enforced they will become bottlenecks to the relief effort to the high degree of detail in the granularity of their logistic management processes. For example relief supplies comes in massive containers and you often do not have time to be shifting through all the packages and working out the exact quantities just become a problem and a bottleneck when people are starving and dying for aid. However as operations get streamlined a smaller granularity to the data tracked can be introduced to improve the efficiency and transparency of aid distribution. The applications need to be build to deal with this sparseness of data at the initial stages.

Recognition of Sahana and Humanitarian-FOSS


Sahana has gained a tremendous amount of recognition in its short tenure both for the project and for the concepts it promotes. Below are some examples:

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) known as one of the two leading organizations responsible for the FOSS movement has created a new award based on humanity, which was directly inspired by Sahana ( Reference: http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=686 http://www.fsf.org/news/social-benefit-award.html )

Dr Sanjiva Weerawarna received a Redhat User Summit award for inspiring the Sahana system ( Reference: http://www.redhat.com/magazine/008jun05/features/awards/ ) Chamindra de Silva was invited and sponsored to talk on the ICT4Peace panel at UN World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) to talk on the application of the use of ICT during the Tsunami. ( Reference: http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/wsis-euc/2005November/000635.html ) IBM Crisis team proactively promotes the use of Sahana for disaster management, promoting it both for application after the Katrina Hurricane and the recent Asian Earthquake. ( Reference: http://www.earthquakepakistan.com/images/IBM_CRT_Pakistan_Mission_Re port.pdf ) Sahana was present at the International FOSSSL 05 developer conference ( Reference: http://www.fosssl.org ) Sahana was presented in the 2nd keynote speech in the Emergency Communication Asia 2005 Conference in Shanghai, China. UNDP IOSN network has allocated a section on their portal for HumanitarianFOSS which features Sahana. This section is managed by the Sahana PM/SA. ( Reference: http://www.iosn.net/foss/humanitarian ) Sahana was presented at the IOSN FOSSAP II conference in Cambodia to present Sahana ( Reference: http://www.iosn.net/events/fossap-2005/presentations/casestudies-ict4d/sahana.pdf )

Sahana Phase II Status


The phase I components were built in a chaotic situation and were very much a hack for the Tsunami requirement. Following the initial development for the Tsunami which was later named phase I, the Sahana project entered phase II in August 2005 with the following objectives:

Generalize the application to handle any disaster scenario from a tsunami to and earthquake to a pandemic Adhering to strict LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) for scalability and ease of deployment. Internationalization of the entire system to allow of L10N to a particular country Build a base application framework to minimize the time to write a new disaster management sub-application Incorporate a good granularity of security features to protect the privacy of data Support additional base architectures such as other databases and OSs Adhere to existing emergency management and humanitarian data exchange standards

To support the above, a disaster management application framework was developed in PHP from scratch that provided the additional features below:

Allows for the independent development of modules/sub-applications by 3rd party groups easy whilst making integration simple

Allows for dynamic plug and play installation and customization of modules required for the disaster with minimal configuration Includes a web setup that automatically launches and set's up the database and the configuration file the first time you run Sahana A HTML template libraries to make writing HTML elements for the forms, menus, etc quick, consistent and elegant A theme and layout engine to allow for the easy modification of the application's user interfaces to cater to the disaster needs A core and flexible data schema shared between application modules

Release: Sahana Phase I LiveCD OCT 2005


Before a application release of Phase II could be made the Asian Earthquake took place and we offered the Phase I version, thus the Sahana Phase I LiveCD was built for the Pakistan requirement. As Phase I was not trivial to deploy it was decided that a pre-configured version of the contained within a LiveCD. A liveCD allows the Sahana system to boot of the CD without touch the host machines hard disk. Additional this allows for the pre-configured installation of the Sahana application and the supporting LAMP/Java stack into the machine without needing to spend time installing each dependency individually. The LiveCD was partially localized to Pakistan specifically by province and village and a copy was given to IBM Pakistan and NADRA to install as and how they wished. Specification

GNU/Linux LiveCD built on Taprobane (Debian based) Dependencies: Apache 1 or 2, MySQL 4.2, PHP 4, Java 1.4 OS: Tested on GNU/Linux Hardware: Tested on Intel PIII upwards License: GPL Target Audience: Government disaster coordination

The Pakistan Sahana Phase I LiveCD can be downloaded from the following location: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=127855&package_id=169330 &release_id=371270

Release: Sahana Phase II 0.1 Alpha NOV 2005


As Phase II was going to be a complete rewrite of Phase I, the first milestone release was to cover all the functionality of Phase I and include some long due enhancements and gaps in functionality that existed in Phase I. To this effect the following applications have completely been rewritten and enhanced as follows: Specification

Available Packages

tar.gz source package Debain deb and Redhat rpm binary packages GNU/Linux LiveCD built on Taprobane (Debian based)

Dependencies: Apache 1 or 2, MySQL 4.2, PHP 4 OS: Tested on GNU/Linux, Mac OSX, FreeBSD, Windows XP Hardware: Tested on Intel PIII upwards, Mac Powerbook G4 License: LGPL Target Audience: Government/NGO disaster coordination

Demo: A demo of this release can be found at http://cvs.opensource.lk/sahana2 Download: The PHP application package can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=127855 LiveCD: A LiveCD of the Phase II release has also been created and can be downloaded from the following location http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=127855&package_id=169330 &release_id=375026

Release: Sahana Phase II 0.2 DEC 2005 - Pending


The 0.2 Release of Sahana will include a lot of enhancements to the base for subapplications of Sahana which will include.

Sahana Websites and Documentation


Most of the Sahana document currently is in WIP form on the community website using WIKIs. The following repositories and publications are available:

Sahana Development WIKI http://sahana.sourceforge.net/wiki/doku.php?id=dev:home


This site is used by Sahana developers to document conventions, standards, tips, help and HOWTOs on Sahana coding

Reliefsource WIKI http://www.reliefsource.org/foss/index.php/Sahana


This WIKI is used by the humanitarian-ICT community and Sahana developers to capture domain and application requirements on the Sahana system

Sahana Brochure http://www.linux.lk/~chamindra/docs/Sahana-Brochure.pdf


This a two-sided A4 brochure of the Sahana system used to bring awarness of what Sahanas purpose and function is

Sahana Website http://www.sahana.lk or http://sahana.sourceforge.net


This the main Sahana product website for people wanting to get information on the Sahana system (site is still under construction)

Sourceforge Sahana Portal http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/sahana


The sourceforge infrastructure is heavily used by the development team. Components used are the mailing lists, bug/enhancement trackers, CVS, tasks lists and the download infrastructure.

Sahana Future Plan


Now that Sahana Phase II has built a flexible and stable base to build upon, one of our major drives will be to work closely with NGOs, Civil society groups and Gov to

further refine and pre-deploy Sahana installations globally in order to improve adoption and disaster preparedness when the next large scale disaster strikes. To allow for flexibility we would like Sahana to be able to deployable in a distributed peer-oriented model as depicted below which allows for sensitive data to be protected, whilst allowing data sharing. Additionally we would like it to be accessible in the field and in camps, for which we plan to test hardware units such as laptops with camera and fingerprint scan and PDA with photo and GPS location facilities. Also to be able to work in a disaster where the majority of telecoms infrastructure is destroyed we will be testing access using satellite phones. The new deployment model is depicted below.

The following additional modules will also be built into the system which is in response to the direction provided by the humanitarian-ICT community and problems faced in the Tsunami and Asian quake for which we did not have solutions for: Component Camp Management System (vs Camp Registry) Description A system deployed at the camp to help manage the camp and easily track the victims within it. This will be deployed as a unit with camera and fingerprint scanner Records all damages to property and provides an estimate of the cost of the recovery effort To record burial site information for the benefit of future reference Quickly transforms an synchronizes data from disparate sources into the central database

Damage database Burial registry Data Consolidation module

Component Mobile Alerts Child Protection Module

Description Send mobile alerts (e.g. SMS/MMS) and critical information to those in the disaster area Children tracking, protection and aid management system built specifically for NGO, Terre des Hommes Especially to supplement the Camp management System to track all resource available, their usage and predict when supplies will run out. Generates custom reports and statistics as required for the different organization groups All of access and reporting of events and incidents in the field with GPS and camera enabled PDAs

Resource Management Module Reporting module Field access PDAs

Other References:
[1] The Open Source Initiative OSI, (2005), (opensource.org), Available: http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php [2] LAMP: The Open web platform, (2001) (onlamp.com), Available: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2001/01/25/lamp.html [3] Sahana Project, (2005), (sourceforge.net) Available: http://sahana.sourceforge.net/ [4] Document A01 - About SourceForge.net?, (2005), (sourceforge.net), Available http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=6025&group_id=1 [5] freshmean.net : About, (2005), (freshmeat.net), Available: http://freshmeat.net/about/ [6] News - Opie - Open Palmtop Integrated Environment, (2005), (opie.handhelds.org), Available http://opie.handhelds.org/ [8] Mozilla Developer Central, (2005), (mozilla.org) http://www.mozilla.org/developer/ [9] CNO Main Page, (2005), (cnosrilanka.org) Available: http://www.cnosrilanka.org [10] Free/Libre Open Source Software, (2005), (wikipedia.org) Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free/Libre_Open_Source_Software [11] The Cathedral & the Bazaar (paperback) By Eric S. Raymond ISBN: 0-596-00108-8

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