SahanaPy Haiti Response
The Sahana Software Foundation operates a SahanaPy instance at:
Services provided so far include:
- Capturing of information about Aid Organisations, their offices and their activities on-site
- Situation Mapping
- Request Management
If you think of volunteering for Sahana – welcome! – we have plenty of tasks for you, e.g.:
- Data collection and entry
- Documentation
- Translation (French, Haitian Creole)
- Code-writing
- Coordination of volunteers
- Communications
Join us on IRC:
Sahana @ ICN Congress 2009
I will give a talk on
“Implementation of Health Management Features in the Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System”
at the 24th Quadrennial Congress of the International Council of Nurses (ICN) in Durban/South Africa, which takes place June 27th to July 4th, 2009.
The International Council of Nurses is a federation of national nurses’ associations (NNAs), representing millions of nurses in more than 128 countries – and it is the world’s widest reaching international organisation for health professionals.
Venue data:
Session C.645 Pandemics/Disasters
02/07/2009, 14:30-15:50 (Presentation start at 15:30)
Hall 2D
International Convention Centre
45 Ordnance Road, Durban/South Africa
www.icc.co.za
More information about the congress can be found at: www.icn.ch/congress2009/index.htm
Sahana workshop in Göteborg
I have attended the Sahana workshop in Göteborg (Sweden) last Sunday, where we discussed about the deployment of Sahana for the management of recurrent flood disasters in Mozambique.
This deployment is part of the IRMA project (Integrated Risk Management for Africa), which is a European research project funded by the European Commission.
 Chamindra, me (Sahana) |
 Bartel van de Walle (ISCRAM) |
 Lourino Chemane (UTICT Mozambique) |
 Ingo Simonis (IRMA) |
The Sahana team will support building up a local Sahana cluster in Mozambique mainly by sharing knowledge with local developers, in terms of providing developer trainings and participating in an on-site Sahana workshop later this year. Starting within this project, we hope to build sustaining capacity and an active community for Sahana in Africa.
Sahana 2009 Conference
The first ever Sahana 2009 Conference in Colombo is over, and I safely returned to Sweden. Thanks to our host, the Lanka Software Foundation, for the excellent arrangement and all the comfort we experienced.
It was an impressive event and an exciting tour from the history to future of the Sahana project, with interesting insights and prospects on ICT in emergency management. But it was also hard work to build the future of Sahana, mainly at the meetings and discussions – offline and online – from breakfast to late night.
The first two days were dominated by a long list of presentations, and many first ever face-to-face meetings of Sahana people who only knew each other from chatrooms and mailing lists. In the course of this conference I also had the chance to present my paper about Sahana Internationalization, and to sow some ideas in this regard.
On the third day, Respere had invited for a Barcamp which turned out to a great chance for understanding among project leads, emergency management experts and code writers. Many of the discussions started there still continue on the main development mailing lists and are echoed in the Sahana GSoC proposals.
On the same day we started with the Sahana.next meetings where we discussed about the future operative structure and governance of the Sahana project, in order to continue fostering Sahana as a global free and open-source software project. As a result of this some pathbreaking decisions have been made, which will now be implemented within the next months. More details and recent news about this can always be found on the Sahana website.
Idle?
While dipping my nose into morning coffee and thinking about how to speed up my neurons, I stumbled over U.S. Patent Nr. 5,498,162
Ok ok – this helped…
Currently I’m heavily working to get out YaNuCa 1.2 next week – there are still a few things to be finetuned.
The Free and Open Source Software Community of Sri Lanka (foss.lk) is hosting the first annual SAHANA Conference on March 24 & 25, 2009 in Colombo/Sri Lanka, which will surely become one of the most important events in the history of this project – and hopefully pathbreaking for its future. Therefore, I see to attend it if somehow possible.
Sahana @ ICN Congress 2009
My abstract on
“Implementation of Health Management Features into the Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System”
has been accepted for a presentation at the 24th Quadrennial Congress of the International Council of
Nurses (ICN) in Durban/South Africa, June 27th to July 4th, 2009.
The International Council of Nurses is a federation of national nurses’ associations (NNAs), representing millions of nurses in more than 128 countries – and it is the world’s widest reaching international organisation for health professionals.
Background
Sahana is a collection of web based disaster management software applications that provides solutions to large-scale humanitarian problems with regard to coordination and collaboration of field workers and relief organizations in a disaster situation and its aftermath. The Sahana project has been initiated in Sri Lanka during the 2004 Tsunami disaster, and since then it was successfully deployed in several disaster situations around the world, lately in the China Earthquake Disaster of May, 2008.Sahana is a free and open source software project, thus it is available free of charge and without narrowing copyright strings, and can easily be customized to the particular situation.
Presentation objectives
Sahana is a valuable technology in humanitarian action, and an excellent platform for health management in large-scale disaster situations as well.Together with other contributors, I have taken responsibility to implement basic health management features to the Sahana system, addressing the following issues:
- Prioritizing of health care services by means of information on the disaster-affected population, demographic and health data as well as information on local health care resources
- Support situation awareness by monitoring of Mortality Rates (CMR,U5MR) and scheduled health status reports
- Coordination and monitoring of measures for prevention, surveillance and control of communicable diseases
- Coordination and monitoring of measures to enable access on safe water and food, sanitation and basic health services
In the context of free software development, I want to encourage nurses and nurses’ organizations worldwide to contribute their knowledge to the further development of this software
Venue data:
Session C.645 Pandemics/Disasters
02/07/2009, 14:30-15:50 (Presentation start at 15:30)
Hall 2D
International Convention Centre
45 Ordnance Road, Durban/South Africa
www.icc.co.za
More information about the congress can be found at:
Sahana Fatality Management Module
I started programming a new Sahana module for fatality management and victim identification.
This module is meant to support communication and data management in the handling of dead bodies and the identification of victims after a disaster, in order to ensure that those killed by a disaster get identified and buried individually and in dignity, and the bereaved get the chance to find out about the fates and whereabouts of their beloved ones.
Some more information about this work can be found at the Sahana Wiki.
