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Sahana Haiti ISCRAM_050310_narrated

by Sahana Software Foundation on May 04, 2010

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Sahana Software Foundation Brief on 2010 Haiti Earthquake Response Delivered to ISCRAM 2010 Conference, May 3, 2010....

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Sahana Software Foundation Brief on 2010 Haiti Earthquake Response Delivered to ISCRAM 2010 Conference, May 3, 2010.

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On January 12th of this year at 4:53 PM local time, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck the poverty-stricken Caribbean nation of Haiti, just south of the densely populated capital of Port-au-Prince. The impact of the earthquake was devastating, with large numbers of multi-storied concrete structures collapsing, killing tens of thousands instantly, while injuring and trapping thousands of others beneath the rubble, and leaving millions homeless. The event occurred just weeks after the fifth anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami, the last major natural disaster of this scale to challenge the international community. It was therefore appropriate that Sahana Free and Open Source Software played a role in helping to coordinate the earthquakerelief efforts for HaitiOn behalf of my co-authors and the core team that coordinated the Sahana Software Foundation’s response to the Haitian Earthquake – some of whom are in the room with me today – I would like to take the next 20 minutes to tell you about Sahana and our work on Haiti.
Sahana is free and open source disaster management software. What that means is that it is free to download, free to use however you wish – there are no license fees - and being open source, it can be easily customized by anyone to serve the needs of any jurisdiction, organization or community. There are many benefits to the use of open source software, which is increasingly recognized for its low barriers to entry and its longevity. The risks and costs are low and the benefits are plentiful. Sahana is about the application of thoseprinciples to disaster management software, and our primary goal is to help victims.
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 of and responders to disasters are numerous. Beyond the trauma, this involves having to coordinate, manage and track things. In countries affected by large scale sudden onset disasters, these problems can be 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 both emergency managers and the community.
Following the tsunami, Sahana was created by the open source community in Sri Lanka - for use by the Centre for National Operations, which was responsible for coordinating the country’s relief and recovery efforts.
Sahana provides a single database for recording who is doing what where – identifying what the needs are – where people are located – and where assistance is needed. The core modules of Sahana include an organization registry, for relief agencies to record their contact information and where they are working. This module also records what services these organizations are providing. Another piece of core functionality is a missing persons and a disaster victims registry for tracking both the missing and the found, those registered at shelters and those needing assistance in family reunification.
Sahana has a request management system that provides a simple means to match pledges of donations with aid requirements; and finally, a shelter registry, to record information about the location and demographic data and health status of the population of relief camps and temporary shelters.
These core functions and modules have proven their value, and Sahana has grown in its capabilities and been rewritten more than once to make it evenmore capable of addressing the disaster information management needs of emergency responding agencies.Today, Sahana’s capabilities are mature and tested in dozens of deployments following major disasters around the world.
Sahana is designed to run on multiple environments – it will even run very stably and reliably off of a USB stick; A Sahana instance can be preconfigured and packaged as a virtual machine image, which greatly speeds and simplifies the challenges of deploying Sahana after a disaster. Sahana has a strong localization and translation capability; it has been translated and localized into dozens of languages – including those using alternative character sets such as Chinese and even right to left scripting languages such as Arabic. Sahana uses open standards for GIS , messaging and data exchange and has extensions for use on mobile devices – including an Android application for situational awareness data collection. Similar applications are planned for the iPhone and other mobile platforms.
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. Recently, Sahana was deployed for use in response to the massive earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Sahana has been adopted as a national disaster response system in both the Philippines and Indonesia and was used last year to assist the victims of typhoons in those countries and several others. In the US, Sahana has been adopted by the City of New York to help manage resources for its all-hazards sheltering plan, and is part of a program in Bethesda, Maryland to provide emergency services for a mass-casualty event.
Sahana has been recognized and received numerous awards, including the prestigious Free Software Foundation Award for Social Benefit, and most recently by PPBI’s Best Practices Award, which was presented to the Sahana Software Foundation for our work responding to the earthquake in Haiti. Sahana has also been the subject of numerous case studies on the effectiveness of open source software – and Sahana in particular – for managing disaster information.
Sahana is supported by a global voluntary community of experts in emergency management and open source software developers; our members represent academic institutions, state and local government, international NGOs, emergency management consultants, private sector IT companies, public health experts, and students.
Sahana projects are governed by the Sahana Software Foundation, which was established as a non-profit organization in 2009. The mission of the Sahana Software Foundation is to develop and promote free and open source software for disaster management and to promote open standards for data exchange.
Immediately following the news of the massive earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, the Sahana community responded with a new model for our response to disasters.Rather than waiting for a “customer” to come along to request to use Sahana, we immediately started working around the clock to set up a hosted instance of Sahana on a publicly accessible website. This was the first deployment of Sahana's python-language version – now called Sahana Eden.
We focused on the areas where Sahana is most valuable – in filling the gaps we found in the disaster information needs of humanitarian agencies.This included a four phase response that developed according to the emerging needs of the relief effort, and included providing an organization registry, a request management system, and a hospital management system, as well as the ability to map a lot of information to provide a common operational picture and situational awareness to responders.
In the first 48 hours after the earthquake, what responders wanted to know was who else was responding, what organizations already had staff in Haiti that could assist, where were they located, and what assets and resources they had available to them.
Sahana’s Organization Registry provided a searchable database of organizations responding to the disaster, the sector where they are providing services, their office locations, activities and their contact details. Organizations were encouraged to self-register and report their office locations or to simply send the Sahana team by e-mail their office or lists of offices. We organized volunteers to assist with data entry and to enter lists from many sources, including pre-disaster lists of organizations working in Haiti available from UN OCHA, as well as active contact lists produced by UNDAC, InterAction and other agencies that included official and accurate points of contact.
The next priority for responders was to know where relief and life-saving efforts were needed.
To address this, Sahana provided a simple Request Management System where the requests for assistance (such as "send water") were made visible to relief organizations working on the ground. Sahana added the capability for organizations to claim requests for fulfillment and later mark them as completed. It also contained a simple ticketing, tracking and reporting system.
We supportedthe work of many other organizations, including InSTEDD, Ushahidi, EIS, the Thomson Reuters Foundation,Crowdflower and Samasource on a project to process SMS messages with requests for assistance and information sent from Haitian citizens and to get that information to the attention of Search and Rescue Teams,the Red Cross and other organizations. This was called Project 4636. SMS text messages sent to short code 4636 in Haiti were translated from Kreyol by Haitian volunteers in the US and put into a structured data format identifying the sender's name, location (to the extent possible), and category of the message.
The message were published by a GeoRSS feed that was then captured by Sahana, which allowed humanitarian agencies to review the requests by category, to search and filter and sort them by priority, and make pledges to fulfill the requests. Sahana is now working with Ushahidi to develop the capability to push updates back to Ushahidi so others can see which requests had been responded to.
Structured twitter posts were processed by Project Epic at the University of Colorado at Boulder through a project called “Tweak the Tweet”. This effortdevelopedahashtag-based syntax to help direct Twitter users to communicate in a way that allowed for efficient machine data extraction and categorization of their posts.
This data was then able to be organized and imported into Sahana’s Request Management Registry for review and response within Sahana.First responders and urban search and rescue teams used these sources of information to save lives in Haiti.
During the second week of the relief operation, there were requests coming from all directions seeking to identify the location and operating status of hospitals and medical facilities within Haiti. Sahana stood up its Hospital Management System in response, which was designed for this very purpose.
First, we organized a volunteer effort to geo-locate approximately 100 hospitals with names by no known coordinates over a 24 hour period. The results of this effort added over 160 hospitals to the Sahana registry that had been set up to manage medical and health facility capacity and needs assessment. A GIS analyst and Open Street Maps contributor from FortiusOne Kate Chapman - donated her time to use the high resolution World Bank flyover imagery of the country to eliminate duplicates and erroneous listings from our dataset, and to improve the accuracy of our data overall. As a result of these efforts, Sahana had the most accurate and comprehensive data set of operating hospitals in Haiti for several critical weeks.
Publishing our hospitals data using the EDXL-HAVE standard allowed other organizations to pull in Sahana’s hospital data into their own systems, adding great value to the efforts to help the Haitian population. Sahana’s advocacy and leadership in the use of the OASIS EDXL-HAVE standard helped lead to its adoption by all organizations attempting to collect and coordinate hospital information. This data and system has now been handed over to the Haitian Ministry of Health and the Pan American Health Organization.
Once organizations, immediately lifesaving needs, and health and medical needs for the injured were addressed, the next challenge faced by the relief operation was ongoing support and care for the victims.
The Sahana Software Foundation was approached in early February by the UN World Food Programme or WFP, who asked us to set up a Food Request Portal – based on the capabilities we had already developed and deployed for the Haiti earthquake response, to help the Food Cluster coordinates requests for food aid to be distributed by humanitarian agencies in Haiti. The Food Request Portal links Sahana’s Organization Registry and Request Management System to WFP and Food Cluster business processes.
These agencies use Sahana to define where food distribution centers are, the number of people they need to feed, and make requests for food deliveries or pickups.This request system allows the World Food Programme to plan for its distributions.Updates are sent back to the humanitarian agencies via SMS message to their registered cellphone number with information on when deliveries or pickups have been scheduled.The system went live within weeks and is being used today in Haiti, with plans to make it a long-term tool of the Food Cluster.
In addition to these core missions, the Sahana portal provided the following functionality: The Persons Registry serves as the main repository of all person-specific information, including registered Sahana users and organization staff. It is utilized and referenced by virtually all other registries as the place where name, address, and contact information is stored for person entities. The Disaster Victim Identification Registry is designed for the management, handling and tracking and tracing of the deceased, dead bodies and body parts and their identification. There is currently no other known open source application for this and Sahana's DVI has been built to Interpol forensic standards. A Shelter Registry was populated with data pulled from multiple sources identifying the locations of temporary encampments sheltering thousands of survivors now homeless. Sahana's mapping client is able to map all of the geo-referenced data within Sahana – the Organization and Office data, the location of hospitals and medical facilities in the Hospital Management System, the locations of food distribution sites including their request status, other geo-referenced requests for information or requests for assistance in the Request Management System, and other important locations such as temporary encampments and relief centers. Sahana's translation project supported Haitian Kreyol and French translations of the Sahana instance stood up for the relief effort. For the food portal, the World Food Programme itself coordinated translations into French, Kreyol and Spanish. Finally, there were some independent deployments of Sahana technologies to support the Haiti earthquake response. The most prominent was done by the National Library of Medicine:
The National Library of Medicine is the world's largest medical library and an arm of the National Institutes of Health. They released a version of their Sahana-based "Lost Person Finder" system for the Haitian disaster, called HEPL for “Haiti Earthquake Person Locator”. The interactive web site provides information about people who have been found in Haiti or who are still missing. They also developed a specialized "Found in Haiti" iPhone application to geolocate found persons. The HEPL system shares information with other person finder systems – including Google’s main Person Finder registry and CNN’s iReport - using the PFIF standard to ensure that all searches operate across the largest possible set of matches. It provides a more user-friendly public viewer for those searching for a loved one using an interactive Notification Wall, with filters for metadata beyond name, and a supplementary iPhone- or email-based input method. As it returns updates made via the PFIF standard back to their source, it does not duplicate the efforts of having multiple missing persons websites.
The Sahana Software Foundation is committed to open standards for data exchange, and the REST controller within the Sahana system deployed for Haiti published all of the organization, person, hospital and request data in all of these standards, making it easy for other systems to access the information within Sahana, and to better utilize it to help the victims of the Haiti earthquake. The Sahana Software Foundation supports the work of standards-setting bodies like OASIS and W3C as a part of our Standards and Interoperability Project.I want to go back and speak about a couple of the standards prominent in the Haiti response.
From the first days after the earthquake, Sahana worked closely with Googleand other organizations to ensure that an agreed common standard for the exchange of Missings Persons data was implemented using the PFIF standard. In past emergencies, literally dozens of conflicting and non-interoperable missing and found persons websites have sprung up; in their attempts to help disaster victims, they succeeded in only making the task of reconciling these records more difficult.By using such a standard as PFIF, it allows multiple systems to add value to a communal dataset without duplicating efforts. In addition to the NLM HEPL system, Sahana also has the ability to build on this dataset in several ways – through – for example, the ability to link missing persons records with those of the deceased in the Disaster Victim Identification registry. In addition, the Sahana Missing Persons registry has additional physical description information fields (not currently being utilized by the PFIF standard). But because Sahana and Google are utilizing the same published standard for data exchange, any updated missing persons status information that Sahana can provide can be pushed back to the main Google repository through PFIF. We have plans to work with Google and other groups on extending the use of this standard and addressing some of its shortcomings for future response efforts.
EDXL-HAVE stands for Emergency Data Exchange Language – Hospital Availability Exchange and is an XML-based OASIS standard that was designed for exactly the type of requirements needed for Haiti – including the ability to report on a hospital or health facilities operating status, bed availability and resource needs. The standard was written and maintained by a group within the US Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology directorate. Within two weeks of the earthquake, the Sahana portal included a hospital management system that provided an EDXL-HAVE feed. Foundation members later worked to extend the use of EDXL-HAVE to other organizations working to collect similar data for Haiti, thus ensuring interoperability and the ability to seamlessly exchange data between these systems. An EDXL-HAVE based architecture was later adopted by the Health Cluster, PAHO and the Haitian Ministry of Health.
We could not have been successful without the support, collaboration and cooperative efforts of many other humanitarian open source projects. These partners deserve special recognition. The spirit of cooperation and collaboration amongst all of these groups was unprecedented.
The response to the Haiti earthquake also brought new partners to Sahana – including the UN World Food Programme.We had significant users from first responders and Urban Search and Rescue Teams working for US SOUTHERN COMMAND and the US COAST GUARD.We also formed strategic partnerships with many US Government and UN agencies around the promotion of open standards.
Many free and open source application are tools for developers. Sahana is different. It is about providing FOSS solutions for disaster responders.Our community is open and we welcome new contributors interested in FOSS and those interested in disaster management. We provide support to those wishing to use Sahana for disaster preparedness and response and other humanitarian purposes. Please feel free to contact us for more information about how to get involved in Sahana.Sahana is Free and Open Source Software.Thank you.

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here, there, anywhere at here, there, anywhere Tags opensource crisisresponse 1 year ago
Robert O’Connor , Student Developer for Sahana at Google Summer of Code 2010 2 years ago