Sahana
2005.09.09
Guest post by Dulan Abeyratne
The word “Sahana” means “relief”. Sahana was set up in response to the need for a disaster management application right after the tsunami of December 26, 2004.
Disasters have a tendency to cause havoc, even when you think that you’re well prepared for them. So its no surprise that the disaster you weren’t prepared for really causes havoc.
In his presentation, Chamindra de Silva of the Lanka Software Foundation (LSF)/Virtusa described the steps involved in setting up Sahana - which he admits, was at the time “a quick hack”.
The potential for IT in Emergency Management (EM) was shown as follows:
- The ability to connect people together quicker and more efficiently than traditional noticeboards and similar methods
- Account for people and keep track of them
- Prioritize the required courses of action in an efficient manner
- Facilitate cooperation among the various stakeholders by providing a common platform
- Efficiently match needs with pledged assistance
- Ensure transparency
Due to the non-commercial nature and ethical perspective involved in disaster/emergency management, the best option available was to go for a FOSS solution.
At present Sahana has completed Phase I of its implementation. The presentation today went on to further describe the manner in which Phase II would go ahead. In light of the natural disaster in New Orleans - it seems that there is a very visible need for tools to help manage disasters.
When you consider that even the richest governments in the world may not have budgeted for disasters and their management, a FOSS solution - with the support of the tech community and experts in Humanitarian ICT and Emergency Management sounds good.
There is already a great deal of interest in Sahana - from IBM, NGOs and also Richard Stallman, generated when Chamindra was in Cambodia doing a presentation about Sahana, as well as from the various awards it has won.
In order to go ahead with Phase II, Sahana will be implementing a hybrid FOSS development model - similar to the Mozilla Firefox development - a sponsored core team will ensure the code and also support the community.
So if you happen to be involved in GIS, mobile devices, PDA/Satellite phones, SMS/MMS or XHTML/CSS/AJAX technologies, then perhaps you’d like to join the effort at Sahana.
