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Humanitarian FOSS:Sahana

Disaster Management System

Fran BoonSahana Developer

FOSSkriti14th February 2009Kanpur,India

www.sahana.lk

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Historic Trigger: The Asian Tsunami 2004

Sun 26 December 2004 Tsunami waves devastate coastal areas of mainly

Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and India Tue 28 December 2004

Many different organizations in Sri Lanka start efforts to write various bits of software to help manage the disaster

www.sahana.lk

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The Sahana Project A web based collaboration tool to address the

common coordination problems during a disaster find missing people manage aid manage volunteers track camps

Used By Government groups Civil society (NGOs) The victims themselves

www.sahana.lk

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Problems before Sahana

IT Solution Centralised, searchable database of victims

Record all structured metadata on a victim (inc photos)

The trauma caused by waiting to be found or to find the next

of kin“Please, please help me find my missing parents / child / relative”

www.sahana.lk

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Missing Person Registry

The People Registry helps track and find missing, deceased, injured and displaced people and families

www.sahana.lk

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Coordinating Relief

IT Solution A contact list of orgs and the services they provide

Reporting to ensure a balanced distribution and coverage of services and relief groups

Coordinating all aid groups and helping them to operate

effectively as one “ Who is doing what where?! ”

“ How can we balance the coverage of support to all affected regions “

www.sahana.lk

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Matching Donations to Actual Needs

IT Solution System to match the requests from

the field to donations and pledges of support

Transparency of donation utilisation, tracking fulfillment details

Managing the multitude of requests from the affected region and matching them effectively to the pledges of

assistance“We need x number of tents not clothes!”

“We have medical supply x, how many do you need and where can we send them?”

www.sahana.lk

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Tracking Temporary SheltersTracking the location of temporary shelters,

camps, etc

“No aid is being sent to this village, they have forgotten us as we are off the beaten path”

“Where are all these temporary shelters and camps and shelters located? how do I contact them?”

IT Solution System that tracks temporary shelters/camps setup after the disaster with GPS coordinates, contact info, services in the shelter, etc

Statistics on the distribution of victims in the region

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The Shelter Registryhelps track temporary

shelters setup following the Disaster

www.sahana.lk

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Sahana Deployments

Tsunami in Sri Lanka – 2005 Deployed by Government. 26,000 families

Earthquake in Pakistan – 2005 Deployed by Government

Landslides in Leyte, Philippines – 2006 Deployed by Government

Earthquake in Peru – 2007 Localised into Spanish

Earthquake in Chengdu, China – 2008 Deployed by local government. 40,000 families

Cyclone in Myanmar – 2008 Localised into Burmese

Floods in Bihar, India – 2008 Localised into Hindi

www.sahana.lk

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Deployment Options

www.sahana.lk

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Why is FOSS appropriate?

Rapid integration requirements requires source Localisation (Language & Context) New Modules Integration with existing ICT resources (Open Stds)

Many countries cannot afford or do not invest No royalties, license costs, etc

Better acceptance than “foreign” proprietary systems Open system => Transparent and trustworthy

World IT community are keen volunteers “Good will” opportunity to alleviate suffering using IT

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Technologies SahanaPy

A ground-up rewrite of Sahana to enable it to meet the next-generation requirements

Web2Py RAD Python MVC Framework Light stack: CherryPy / SQLite ORM for database portability

jQuery Web 2.0 using Unobtrusive JavaScript

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Technologies (cont) GIS

Sensors report measurements along with location

OpenLayers

SMS for authenticated data entry/search(inc GPS coordinates) Report Missing Person Search for a Missing Person Run a query like “Are there any Situations

recorded within x km of this location?” Kannel/SMSTools

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Technologies (cont)

Infrastructure LaunchPad: DVCS using Bzr Trac: Integrated Wiki / Bugs / CI

Testing Selenium

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Interested.. Join Us! As a FOSS project everyone is welcome to

contribute :-)

Development Domain Expertise Quality Assurance Donations Advocacy Deployments Localisation COMMUNITY: mailing lists, Wiki, #Sahana