Open Source Disaster Management

[mdlbear]

SAHANA | Free and Open Source Disaster Management System

Sahana is a Free and Open Source Disaster Management system. It is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.

(From Groklaw.)

Sahana was developed in Sri Lanka (that's where .lk is, in case you were wondering) in response to the tsunami of 2004, and was deployed after just two weeks of development. If you need it, and I damned well hope you never do, you can have it up and running on Linux or Windows in half an hour or so.

Comments

[ravan.livejournal.com]

There is a Sahana Live CD Nice for disaster kits that include laptops and generators.

[mdlbear]

But if you're putting a laptop into your disaster kit you might as well install Sahana first.

It's even better for the -- probably more common -- case of "go into an area, scrounge some PCs from the local school, get the generator off the truck, and set up a community data center."

[ravan.livejournal.com]

Or even "drag my regular laptop out, hook it up to a car charger, and load the Sahana disk"

[chatworthy.livejournal.com]

Interesting that they have a missing persons module. I did a little bit of missing persons database work post-Katrina. There's an informal standard for missing persons data sharing called People Finder Information format (google the acronym PFIF) which was developed after 9/11. I'm curious if Sahana uses that. Will investigate.