The document summarizes the evolution of the Sahana system and community from its origins responding to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to its development into a global open source disaster management platform. It describes how Sahana was initially built hastily during the tsunami crisis, then redesigned as a modular open source system to address common disaster problems and attract broader participation. It outlines key Sahana applications and how the system and community have continued to respond to new disaster needs and official government deployments around the world.
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Sahana General 2009 Community And System
1. 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
2. “In the long history of
humankind (and animal
kind, too) those who
learned to collaborate and
improvise most effectively
have prevailed”
- Charles Darwin
3. Agenda
Before Evolution... Environment?
Sahana System & Community Interaction
Mutation of Sahana so far..
4. 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
6. 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”
7. 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
8. 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
9. 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
10. 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
11. SA in Emergency Management
Well Trained
Well defined Responders
Information
Flows
Information
Situation
Act
Awareness
Information
Decide
Well defined
Response
Process
12. 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
13. 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
14. 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
15. 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 )
16. 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
17. 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
18. How Sahana Started
Tsunami 2004
Builds
Sri Lanka
Urgent
IT
Requirements
Sahana
Community
Software
IT Community =
LSF + LKLUG + IT Industry + Academia
19. 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
22. 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!!
23. 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
24. Sahana Phase II
A Global Need (2005)
Builds
LSF
Requirements
+ SIDA Funds
Sahana
Team
Phase II
FOSS
Software
LSF Team =
“Techies” and FOSS Enthusiasts
25. “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
26. 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
27. 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
28. 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
29. 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
30. 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
31. 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
32. The community + FOSS cycle
2006
Builds & Refines
LSF +
Global Community Sahana
Software
Attracts & Grows
33. 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
34. 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
35. Other Modules Get Added
Disaster Victim (IDP) Module
Volunteer Management Module
Inventory Management
Evacuation Management
Data Import / Export
Reporting Module
37. 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”
38. It continues.. forged in the fire
Incident or Dire Need
Builds & Refines
Sahana
Urgent
Community
Requirements
Sahana
Software
Attracts & Grows
39. 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
40. 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
41. It continues.. forged in the fire
Incident or Dire Need
Builds & Refines
Sahana
Urgent
Community
Requirements
Software +
Best Practices
Attracts & Grows
42. 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
44. The 4 Communities of Sahana
Emergency
Free & Open
Management
Source
Community
Community
SAHANA
Humanitarian Academic
Community Research
(NGOs) Community
45. 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”
46. 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
47. 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
48. Take Part in the R-Evolution
Join us in taking Sahana to the next level
Join the Sahana Community!
http://www.sahana.lk
49. 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