Evolution of the Sahana
System and Community
Sahana Conference
March 24 2009, Sri Lanka
Chamindra de Silva
SAHANA, Director and First PMC Chair
VIRTUSA, Technology Strategist
H-ICT Community Co-Founder
W3C EIIF XG Co-Chair

“In the long history of
humankind (and animal
kind, too) those who
learned to collaborate and
improvise most effectively
have prevailed”
- Charles Darwin

Agenda
Before Evolution... Environment?

Sahana System & Community Interaction

Mutation of Sahana so far..


Environment: What is a Disaster?
“A disaster is a serious disruption of
the functioning of a society, causing
widespread human, material or
environmental losses which
exceeds the ability of the affected
society to cope using only its own
resources”
Source:UNDP

Some Disaster by Type and Impact

A more specific definition
UK Home Office Definition:
”Any Event or Circumstance (happening with or
without warning) that causes or threatens
death or injury, disruption to the community on
such a scale that the effects cannot be dealt
with by the emergency services, local
authorities and other organizations as part of
their normal day today activities”

The Response Community
Disasters Coordination
10s of Orgs 100s of Orgs 1000s – 1 Mill
Local Relief
Government Relief UN, NGOs
Spontaneous volunteers,
Local Authorities, Police, Red Cross, OCHA, CARE,
corporate village
Army, Fire fighters, WHO, Sarvodaya, etc
communities, friends and
+ Authorized coord + focused on people
family
+ Well trained + trusted to accept aid
+ first responders
+ Accountable +/- less well trained
+ lot of capacity
+/- Big picture relief + accountable
+ instant aid
(e.g. national security) - Donor driven
- not trained
- Procedures create - narrow focus / fragmented
- focus unknown
bottlenecks - sometimes competing
- not accountable
- Overloaded
Effective Collaboration and Coordination!
Relief
Victims

Objectives of Disaster Management
Achieve survival of maximum number of

people and suffering of the minimum
Restore essential services ASAP

Restore order to chaos

Inform the public

Coordinate Relief

Provide a foundation for subsequent Recovery


Typical Problems Responders have
work on..
Search And Rescue Tracing Missing
 
People
Evacuation

Trauma Counseling

Setting up Shelters

Assuring Security of

Effective Distribution

Affected Areas
of Aid
Protecting Children

Management of

Donars and Donations Rehabilitation

Live saving decisions need to be made very fast!
The best decisions are the most informed ones

Situation Awareness
Defn: “Perception of the environment
critical to decision-makers in complex and
dynamic situations”
Studies show, lack of SA has been identified as

one of the primary factors in accidents attributed
to human error (Hartel, Smith, & Prince, 1991; Merket, Bergondy,
& Cuevas-Mesa, 1997; Nullmeyer, Stella, Montijo, & Harden, 2005)
Important especially in high information flow, high

consequential impact domains (lives at stake)
Air Traffic Control, Military Command and Control,

Emergency Response, Disaster Management

SA in Emergency Management
Well Trained
Well defined Responders
Information
Flows
Information
Situation
Act
Awareness
Information
Decide
Well defined
Response
Process

Disaster => Unexpected info Sources
Government & Emergency Services relief

capacity has been exceeded or crippled
To match relief capacity boundary of

response effort extends to external groups
(NGOs, Civil Society, Foreign Aid, UN)
Core Decision Makers need to consult a

wider group for better situation awareness
Information has to be gathered from non-

traditional “uninitiated” sources for better
Situation Awareness

SA in Disaster Management
Multiple Disparate
Information Sources
Diverse Responders
Relief workers,
Information
Volunteers
Overload
Info
rma Large delta
tion
to reality
Situation
Information Act
Awareness??
Information
ion
mat
for
In
Decide
n
o
ati
m
r
nfo Multiple Parallel independent Processes
I

If you were to do it manually
2
Channels N(N-1)/2 = O(N ) 5

Information Lost in relay

and propagation 10
Redundant Data Collection

8
Inconsistent Terminology

Manual Collation /

28
Calculation 16
Delayed Situation

Awareness
120

How Can I.T. Help?
Scalable management of information

No stacks of forms and files to manage

Efficient distribution of information

Accessibility of information on demand

Automatic collation and calculation

No delay for assessments and calculations

Live Situation Awareness

Reports are updated live as data goes in

IT Improves Manageability ( I α H x V / M )

Thus the Sahana Project
What is it?

A free & open source

portable web tool
Sub-applications designed

to address the common
Disaster Management probs
A RAD platform

Main Goals

Bring Efficiencies to Disaster Coordination and

Prompt Response
Facilitate the effective information exchange

between responders and beneficiaries
Primary focus is to help victims


The Historic Trigger: Tsunami 2004
26 December 2004
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

How Sahana Started
Tsunami 2004
Builds
Sri Lanka
Urgent
IT
Requirements
Sahana
Community
Software
IT Community =
LSF + LKLUG + IT Industry + Academia

The First Community
“We just wanted to help our countrymen”

We used our skills to provide a tool

Operational model - “Chaos”

400 IT volunteers

1st week 24hr development

Major releases almost daily

Applications

Missing Person Registry, Organization

Registry, Request management System,
Camp Registry

They Build it for the CNO

Independent Hazard Info. Center

Lessons Learned
Surprisingly no one had built such a

system before!
The open source community coupled with

the humanitarian spirit is a tremendous
catalyst for change
BUT
NEVER build a disaster management

system from scratch during a disaster
again!!

Inspired the Second Phase of Sahana
Proposal Objectives
Build a scalable disaster management sys

Develop Sahana application framework

Develop Initial set of core applications

Make it Open Source and take it global

LSF Core team was funded by SIDA for one
year

Sahana Phase II
A Global Need (2005)
Builds
LSF
Requirements
+ SIDA Funds
Sahana
Team
Phase II
FOSS
Software
LSF Team =
“Techies” and FOSS Enthusiasts

“Plugin” / Platform Pattern
New Module
Core Module Core Module New Module
Framework and Platform Services
The Plugin / Modular Architecture pattern

Enables evolutionary parallel development

“Survival of the fittest module”

Consistent Base Platform for RAD

Themed UI, Support diverse multiple-clients

Security, Data management, Error handling

GIS, WS, Reporting Toolkits

Eg. Firefox, Symbian, Android, PHP, Eclipse


Why we choose LAMP?
(L)AMP – (Linux) Apache MySQL PHP

Free and Open Source end to end

Lightweight (Process and Space)

PHP is easy scripting language to pick up

Rapid “natural” web app development

PHP encourages stateless sessions =>

horizontally scalable
LAMP Packages: WAMP, XAMPP


Who is doing What, Where & When?
Registry of

operating relief
organizations
Coverage of

Services
Self-Allocation and

Reporting
Contact Information

The Organization Registry helps maintain data
(contact, services, region, etc) of organizations
groups and volunteers working in the disaster

Tracking Missing People / Casualties
Shared Bulletin

Board of lost /
found
Computer based

search heuristics
Tracking Family

units
Analyzing networks

of connections
The Missing People Registry helps track and
find missing, people

Matching Aid to Ground Realities
Estimating Needs

Matching Aid to

Ground Needs
Inventories/Catalog

Quantities

Expiration dates

Re-order levels

Tracking Allocation

The Request Management System tracks all requests and
helps match pledges for support, aid and supplies to fullfilment

Collaborative Situation Mapping
Collaborative Map of
Hazards / Incidents

Shelters (IDPs)

(field) Hospitals

Organizations

Responders

Stores

etc

The Shelter Registry helps track data on all
shelters setup following the Disaster

Initial Development Model
Lightweight Software Engineering Project

team with Open Source community
participation and advocacy
REASON
Had to deliver on a timeliness and

deliverables of a funded SIDA project
We had to have an initial “complete” app to

attract community participation
e.g. Open Office, Mozilla


The community + FOSS cycle
2006
Builds & Refines
LSF +
Global Community Sahana
Software
Attracts & Grows

What is Free and Open Source?
Free as in Speech

Freedom to access, run, modify and redistribute

Open Source

Is a set of principles and practices that promotes access

to the design and production of goods and knowledge
Open APIs, Open Code (Blueprints), Open Standards

Regulated by FOSS Licenses

GPL (FSF), LPGL (FSF), Apache (ASF), BSD, CPL

Based on Copyright law, but spun on it's head (copyleft)

Rights are passed perpectually to users

GPL have been proven in court e.g. FSF vs BT

Software is special

Open Source software becomes a global public good


Alignment to Humanitarian Values
Freely Available to deploy

No discrimination on access (Red Cross CC #2)

Ability to “leave technology behind” (RC CC #6)

Rapid customization to actual needs with code

L10N and integration (RC CC #5)

Building local capacities & self-reliance (RC CC #6)

Open system => Transparent and trustworthy

Better acceptance than “foreign” proprietary systems

Countries/NGOs can collaborate to develop

Get the best minds from the world to participate in

building the software
This should be a global public good

Build on each others work by including it in project

Called Humanitarian-FOSS or H-FOSS

Other Modules Get Added
Disaster Victim (IDP) Module

Volunteer Management Module

Inventory Management

Evacuation Management

Data Import / Export

Reporting Module


Mobile Research POCs
+ Synchronization
OLPC
USB Disk / Laptop
PDA

Phase II later stages and early 2007
Team composition

LSF Core team providing development and

regular releases
Global community providing design input and

helping to spread awareness
Leadership

Sahana Committee

50% developers and 50% domain experts

“Meritocracy on contribution”


It continues.. forged in the fire
Incident or Dire Need
Builds & Refines
Sahana
Urgent
Community
Requirements
Sahana
Software
Attracts & Grows

Incidents Sahana has responded to
Gov-NADRA, for Asian Quake in Pakistan – 2005

Officially deployed and integrated to NADRA (Pakistan

Government) to track all victims
Gov, 3 Disaster in Philippines – 2006

Officially deployment to track all victims with by Philippines

Government + pre-deployment
Yogjarkata Earthquake, Indonesia – 2006

Deployed by ACS, Indonesian Reliefsource

NYC prepardness in US – 2007

New york city evacuation management

Gov, Earthquake, Peru – 2007

Gov, Shizuan Earthuake in China – 2008

Deployed by Police to reunite families

Sahana Downloaded overs 25,000 times

Lessons Learned on Deployment
System should be endorsed and/or

authorized by Government (and UN)
IT Literacy and User familiarity

System should be easy to install

If possible pre-deploy and train!

A Sahana local response team is ideal

Local cultural and operational knowledge

Build resilient systems (=> simple, flexible)

Standards are very important for

acceptance

It continues.. forged in the fire
Incident or Dire Need
Builds & Refines
Sahana
Urgent
Community
Requirements
Software +
Best Practices
Attracts & Grows

Endorsements and Awards
New Free Software Foundation (FSF) award for

“Social Benefit” won and inspired by Sahana
Sourceforge Project of the Month, June 2006

Software 2006, CA USA Good Samaritan Award

One of the top 10 Open Source Project to keep

an eye on – Network World article
Recognized by forums such as:

− US WSIS, ISCRAM, UNDP IOSN, StrongAngel,
AsiaOSS Symposium, Emergency
Communications Asia

The Community Spreads (2007)
An Open Global Community (300+)

The 4 Communities of Sahana
Emergency
Free & Open
Management
Source
Community
Community
SAHANA
Humanitarian Academic
Community Research
(NGOs) Community

Different Perspectives of the elephant
“Innovative
“Cool LAMP
but not mature
Development
EM System”
Platform!”
SAHANA
“A great
“By the
Research
Community
POC
for the
Platform”
Community”

PMC and Board is Formed
2007 LSF institutes the PMC and Board

To take Sahana to the next level

Sahana Committee => PMC

Board is appointed by LSF

Open Source and EM Profiles + Some PMC

members
This group was given the mandate to take

Sahana to the next level

In Conclusion
Sahana was and continues to be forged in

the fire (it keeps it very real)
Sahana Neutral A-Political Solution where

ownership is given to the end user
The FOSS benefits align to humanitarian

values very well
A diverse community is fundamental to the

continued success of the project
Sahana is now more than just Software


Take Part in the R-Evolution
Join us in taking Sahana to the next level
Join the Sahana Community!
http://www.sahana.lk

Sahana has different priorities
Enterprise Application Sahana
Multi-Node, Many Replicable Mobile Single-
Dependant Fixed Nodes Node with low spec
Deployment and high concurrency hardware require + USB
Compiled for efficiency Low learning curve, easily
and legacy mature modifiable scripting
Technology programming language language
Simple “Intuitive”
Self contained complex Architecture with OS
Architecture with high dependencies and low
Architecture cyclometic complexity cyclomatic complexity
Low network throughput
Highly interactive, XHTML UI accessible on
User Interface responsive RIA application PDAs

APPENDIX