looking east

Sahana is a open source disaster management system developed in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami in order to manage the scale of the disaster. It has recently received the Free Software Foundation Award for Social Benefit. The system’s features (or modules, see Wikipedia for more details) include:

• Sahana Missing Person Registry: An online bulletin board of missing and found people.

• Sahana Organization Registry: A registry which keeps track of all the relief organizations and civil society groups working in the disaster region.

• Sahana Shelter Registry: A registry which keeps track of the location of all the shelters in the region and some basic data on the facilities they might have and the number of people in them.

• Sahana Request/Aid Management System: A central online repository where all relief organizations, relief works, government agents and camps can effectively match requests of aid and supplies to pledges of support.

• Sahana Volunteer Coordination System: A system which helps NGO’s to manage their volunteer workers.

• Sahana Situation Awareness: A module that helps people to keep track of the current situation.

Sahana is a very interesting software project as it was built by volunteers after the Tsunami when there was an urgent need for a software system to support the disaster management. The effective use and adaption of state-of-the-art Open Source software has definitely played a very crucial role in its development and proves that Open Source is becoming increasingly important in Asia.