Sahana: a disaster to another

Sahana is a disaster management software. Designed originally from Sri Lanka by the Lanka Software Foundation, following the Tsunami of 26 December 2004, it is currently carried by the Sahana Software Foundation and is licensed under a free GNU LGPL .

Sahana is a collaborative Web tool to overcome coordination problems occurring during a disaster. It can treat the search for missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps and coordination among various agencies (government and government agencies, NGOs) working on a site affected by a disaster, from the phase of first aid.

After following various humanitarian projects between 2005 and 2008 (in Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Peru or Myanmar), the Sahana team reacted to the recent earthquake in Haiti , which devastated the island and its population on 12/01/2010. She took the initiative to adapt the system of disaster management Sahana for Haiti (see also: " Sahana Software Foundation to Haiti Earthquake ") and for the needs of its people and teams and organizations involved in this context. A portal dedicated to the management of the humanitarian crisis in Haiti has been created: Haiti 2010 Sahana Disaster Response Portal .

An initiative of the OLPC foundation

Meanwhile, the OLPC foundation has proposed an initiative on his blog (" Mobilizing Haiti: Apply for Free Ruggedized Laptops ") to support, by its logistics and XO computer donations, humanitarian aid projects directed at the victims of the disaster of Port-au-Prince and its region. The interest of the OLPC foundation is not limited, indeed, educational projects initiated in the poorest countries. The OLPC foundation has never stopped supporting many small projects such as " grassroots ", and encourage experimentation, especially in the field of medical and humanitarian .

Convergence humanitarian

Thus the Sahana project and OLPC could materialize their convergence, in helping the people, by allowing the system to use emergency Sahana on the XO computer , either by installing the system with Sugar , on USB stick or an SD Card boarding system Xtra Ordinary .

The Sahana system on the XO

Decisive advantages

Convergence between different projects is critical to provide rapid responses and strong needs as critical as the recording:

• Missing Persons
• of deceased
• the wounded and survivors
• shelters, location and capacity

and other tasks and requirements such as:

• volunteer management
• the establishment of a management system requests
• data synchronization
• the use of open standards and data integration

The advantages are scalability (new features and translations - in French or Haitian Creole , for example - are added as needed), and technological (system, freely licensed LGPL relies on standard tools Apache, mySQL, PHP), the robustness and sustainability of the XO computer, community ownership, versatility.

In fact, all the skills and contributions are welcome and encouraged to implement these systems effectively relief and support to victims of disasters.