Sahana - Mark Prutsalis

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Good evening. It’s a pleasure to be here in Washington DC where I started my career in disaster management. My name is Mark Prutsalis and I am a director of the Sahana project, which is what I am here to speak about. Sahana is a free and open source disaster management system.

Sahana is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, managing inventory and tracking the location and population of relief camps.

The historic trigger for Sahana was the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 that left almost a quarter of a million dead, millions homeless and jobless, and several countries devastated structurally, economically and psychologically.

The problems faced by both the victims and responders to disasters are numerous. Beyond the trauma of the victims and their responders, this involves having to coordinate, manage and track things. In the countries affected by the tsunami, these problems were massive and overwhelming.

Technology can address many of the data management challenges and requirements by providing solutions that are scalable, efficient, automatic and by providing live data and situational awareness to emergency managers and other decision makers

Following the tsunami, Sahana was developed by the open source community in Sri Lanka along with some international experts - for use by Sri Lanka’s Centre for National Operations, which was responsible for coordinating the countries relief and response efforts to the tsunami.

Sahana’s four core modules include an organization registry, for relief agencies to record their contact information and where they are working. It includes a missing persons and disaster victims registry for tracking and reunification.

It has a request management system that provides a means to match pledges of donations with aid requirements; and finally, a shelter registry, to record information about the location and population of relief camps and temporary shelters. Other modules and capabilities include a volunteer management system, an inventory system, messaging and mapping.

Sahana is designed to run on Linux or Windows and on other environments – you can even run it very stably and reliably off of a USB stick, it has a strong localization and translation capability; uses open standards for GIS and messaging, and has extensions for use on mobile devices.

This allows Sahana to be deployed rapidly by a number of different organizations, who can still exchange and synchronize data with each other. This also allows for rapid application development of new modules based on the requirements of each post-disaster deployment.

Since 2004, Sahana has been successfully deployed by national authorities and NGOs to cope with the aftermath of several major disasters, from Asia to the Americas, as well as for emergency preparedness and ongoing assistance projects.

Sahana’s reach today is truly global, with deployments on all continents supported by the Sahana project directly, by the Sahana open source development community, and in a few instances independently by individuals and organizations.

To briefly mention a couple of these deployments – first in Pakistan following the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, the government adopted, adapted and integrated Sahana into its own database that contains the records of every individual in the country.

This allowed them to reconcile missing persons reports, verify the identify of the hospitalized, and to reunite separated families. And Pakistan is still using Sahana code today in its own disaster management systems

Second, the City of New York’s Office of Emergency Management has customized Sahana to help manage its Coastal Storm Plan, that involves the staffing and management of over 500 public shelters that can hold over 700,000 persons.

Sahana’s disaster victim registry was adapted to match the official paper forms and business processes used by the City for the intake of individuals and families and even pets at City shelters. This is one of the strengths of Sahana as its framework is designed to make it easy to make such modifications.

Sahana provides situational awareness to the City’s emergency operation center through its ability to report, in real time, on the population of each shelter in the City, and also manages the assignment and notification of the over 30,000 City employees who will staff the shelters.

Sahana has been recognized and received numerous awards from the Open Source community, including the prestigious Free Software Foundation Award for Social Benefit, which was inspired by Sahana, although they awarded it to Wikipedia the first year; Sahana the second.

Major announcements for Sahana in 2009 include at a meeting in Sri Lanka on March 27, 2009, an interim board was given the mandate to set up an independent foundation as a 501c3; at the same time, we are ready to release Sahana version 1.0 this summer, and will be adding Logistics Management capabilities to Sahana.

Thank you; I see my time is up. I’d be glad to answer any questions you may have throughout the weekend. If you write quickly, these are all the ways to contact me.

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Sahana - Mark Prutsalis - Presentation Transcript

Sahana Free & Open Source Emergency & Disaster Management System http://www.sahana.lk Mark Prutsalis Director, Sahana Software Foundation “ No innovation matters more than that which saves lives” Avelino J. Cruz, Jr., Secretary of National Defense, Philippines on the use of Sahana deployed in the aftermath of disastrous mudslides in the Philippines
What is Sahana?
The Historic Trigger: 12/24/04 Indian Ocean Tsunami
- At least 226,000 dead
- Up to 5 million people lost homes, or access to food and water
- 1 million people left without a means to make a living
- At least $7.5 billion in the cost of damages
Problem: Aftermath of Disasters
- The trauma caused by waiting to be found or find the next of kin
- Coordinating all aid groups and helping them to operate effectively as one
- Managing the multitude of requests from the affected region and matching them effectively to the pledges of assistance
- Tracking the location of all temporary shelters, camps, etc.
How Can Technology Help?
- Scalable management of information
- Efficient distribution of information
- Automatic collation and calculation
- Live situational awareness
Sahana Core Modules
- Organization Registry
- Missing Persons / Disaster Victim Registry
Sahana Core Modules
- Request Management
- Shelter Registry
Sahana Technology and Features
- FOSS
- Synchronization
- Web Services
- Messaging
- Localization
- Spatially enabled (GIS)
- PDA/Mobile Accessibility
- LiveCD, LiveUSB
Sahana Deployment Vision
Sahana Deployments
- Asian Tsunami in Sri Lanka – 2005
- Kashmir Earthquake in Pakistan – 2005
- Landslide disaster in Philippines – 2005
- Sarvodaya and Terre des Hommes (NGOs), Sri Lanka
- Yogjakarta Earthquake, Indonesia – 2006
- Earthquake in Peru - 2007
- Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh – 2007
- Coastal Storm Plan in New York City – 2007
- Ica Earthquake, Peru – 2007
- Chendu-Sitzuan Province Earthquake, China – 2008
- National Disaster Management Center & Ministry of Resettlement & Disaster Relief Services, Sri Lanka – 2009
Sahana’s Global Reach Official Deployments Independent Deployments Community
Kashmir Earthquake 2005 Balakot, Pakistan: 60% loss of life Maj. General Khalid Nawaz, Muzaffarabad (GOC 12 DIV)
Shelter Management for NYC Office of Emergency Management (OEM)
NYC Sahana Intake Based on Official Paper Forms
NYC OEM Situational Awareness
Recognition
- Free Software Foundation Award for Social Benefit – 2006
- SHG Good Samaritan Award – 2006
- BBC Documentary, The Codebreakers – 2006
- Sourceforge Project of the Month – June 2006
- User Award from Redhat Summit – 2005
- ICTA Awards to contributors
- Used for many Research Projects, University Courses in many Universities Globally.
Major 2009 Events
- Sahana Software Foundation to take over governance of Sahana from the Lanka Software Foundation as independent 501(c)(3)
- Sahana 1.0 being released this summer
- Logistics Management Capabilities
THANK YOU
- Mark Prutsalis
- Director
- Sahana Software Foundation
- http://www.sahanafoundation.org
- [email_address]
- President, Gl  bal iist Inc.
- http://Living-Prepared.com
- http://www.globaliist.com
- [email_address]
- Skype: mark.prutsalis
- IRC #sahana: mprutsalis