Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System

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1 Historic Trigger
2 Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System
3 Humanitarian FOSS
4 Deployments
5 Research aspect
6 Recognition & Awards
7 External links

[edit] Historic Trigger

The Tsunami that hit Sri Lanka on December 26th 2004 resulted in a massive outpouring of support for the relief of the nearly one million people that it affected. When literally thousands of people from every conceivable multilateral organization 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. 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.

[edit] Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System

The Sahana Free and Open Source project was quickly built over a 2-3 week period around the time of the Asian Tsunami to help coordinate the relief effort in Sri Lanka. It was initially built by a group of volunteers consisting mostly of the Sri Lankan IT industry and spearheaded by the Lanka Software Foundation, a FOSS R&D NPO. 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.

Based on the positive response to the project development continues today on the next phases of the project making the system applicable for global use and to be able to handle any large scale disaster. The long term objectives of Sahana are to grow into a complete disaster management system, including functionality for mitigation, preparation, relief and recovery.

It is distributed under terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License

[edit] Humanitarian FOSS

Sahana also spawned a community based on the more generic ideals of Humanitarian-FOSS where the ideals of FOSS are applied for building humanitarian-ICT applications or applications built to help alleviate human suffering. This contribution was recognized by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Sahana inspired a new FSF Award for Projects of Social Benefit which is broader in coverage than humanitarian-FOSS.

[edit] Deployments

Deployed officially in Sri Lanka for Asian Tsunami, 2005 (CNO)
Deployed officially in Pakistan for Asian Quake, 2005 (NADRA)
Deployed officially in Philippines for Mudslide Disaster, 2006
Being deployed in Sri Lanka's largest NGO, Sarvodaya's Disaster unit, 2006

[edit] Research aspect

The project has also spurred research in a diversity of areas. Professor Louiqa Raschid, University of Maryland is leading/guiding the team in Sahana and Disaster Management research. Sahana has been presented at numerous conferences/workshops/events and already has one paper accepted for an international conference.

A paper on Sahana and Disaster Management is accepted for the 2nd International Conference on Information and Automation 2006

Research plays an important role in Sahana due to lack of previous research in ICT for Disaster Management. Refer to Sahana Research WIKI for a comprehensive list of Sahana publications/presentations and research effort.