Emergency Information Systems Interop Workshop for better preparedness @ ISCRAM 2011

I would like to announce that we are organizing an emergency/disaster information systems interop workshop for the next ISCRAM 2011. The interop workshop will be an environment where software vendors and information systems solution providers can bring in their systems for testing against popular information exchange standards such as PFIF, CAP, GeoRSS, EDXL Standards, GIS Standards, etc. The structure will be based on the Apache interop workshops. More importantly we will want to test, improve and validate information exchange between systems for certain popular pre-defined use-cases utilizing these standards. Thereby the results of this workshop will serve better preparedness by assuring that the systems that participate are able to exchange data effectively and work more efficiently in partnership at the time of disaster response.

The interop workshop will be part of the information systems interop standards track, where you can also submit research papers, work in progress papers, practitioner presentations covering best practices and demos for inclusion in ISCRAM. We are also welcoming presentations on new, existing and emerging interop standards for educational purposes to help improve awareness, facilitate feedback and adoption.

Participants interested in participating for the interop workshop can submit their solutions/products/demos/

functional prototypes as a demo for this track.

Further submission details can be found at:
  http://iscram2011.lnec.pt/pdf/tracks/information_systems_interop_standards.pdf

For information of the ISCRAM 2011 conference the main website is:
  http://iscram2011.lnec.pt/

We look forward to your participation to this much needed exercise. If you have any suggestion on this track please do not hesitate to contact myself, Renato Iannella or Tom de Groeve. We also want to form a steering committee for the interop workshop, so do let us know if you would like to join that.

UN APCICT/ESCAP Publication on ICT for Disaster Risk Reduction includes Sahana

The recent UN APCICT/ESCAP Case Studies on ICT for Disaster Risk Reduction includes the Sahana project focusing on the experiences deploying Sahana for the Haiti Response. It includes a lot of other case studies and best practices in different countries in the Asia Pacific Region and is a worthwhile read. You can find the publication on the UNAPCICT website at http://www.unapcict.org/ecohub/ict-for-disaster-risk-reduction-1. I co-authored this case study with Mark Prutsalis. Thank you to APDIP for continuing to recognize Sahana contributions in this sector.

Ushahidi and Sahana will work closely together in disaster response

I had an opportunity to meet Juliana Rotich, Co-Founder and Program Director of Ushahidi during the III Congress in Spain and we had a great discussion on how Sahana and Ushahidi could collaborate more moving forward building from our strengths and partnering on disaster response. We had been collaborating recently during the Haiti Response. The way Ushahidi and Sahana organizes itself as projects are very similar based on Free and Open Source Source principles and we also even share the technology stack (PHP), thus integration would be quite easy. We have also arranged for our development teams to meet for an integration hackerton. Juliana also became a good friend and here we posing for that "formal" landmark handshake between Ushahidi and Sahana to pledge work closely together in disaster response.:-)

Speaker and RT participant at III International Congress, Spain

I had the opportunity to represent Sahana and Sri Lanka at III International Congress event in Gijon, Spain. The event was about building better corporation between “north” and “south” countries and for learning about the innovation in ICT that was coming up from the south. The audience was represented by policy makers in Europe and the UN and innovators from Africa and Asia. I was invited to speak as well as be a round table participant and I took that opportunity to talk about Sahana, H-FOSS and also brought some awareness to the ICT industry in South Asia. In the Round Table discussions keep points I mentioned was that innovation from the south too often get’s tagged with an ICT4D banner for novelty and this hides it’s true potential to be applicable as an globally applicable innovation in its own right. I also am not a fan of the "North/South" term and any demarcation that creates artificial barriers for collaboration. In cyberspace at least we are all equal and social networking is working to eliminate such divides as it no longer matter where you live. Overall I met some great people and made good friends amongst the participants and speakers and look forward to further collaboration with them. Notable for Sahana we made some good links to collaborate with Ushahadi, TachicalTech and UNDP.

References:

• III Congress Coop 2.0 Event: http://encuentro2010.fundacionctic.org/en/ponentes/
• Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/cooperacionarroba/evolution-of-the-sahana-open-source-project
• Newspaper article: http://www.lne.es/gijon/2010/03/02/creamos-software-libre-sri-lanka-gestion-desastres-tsunami/880526.html
• Newspaper article 2: http://www.europapress.es/asturias/innova-00297/noticia-innova-fundacion-sahana-presentara-cooperacion-20-herramienta-gestion-ayuda-desastres-20100123120539.html
• Newspaper article 3: http://mas.lne.es/siasturias/etiquetas/iii-congreso-internacional-de-tic-en-cooperacion-al-desarrollo/

Sahana at Relief 02 at Camp Roberts, California

We had a fantastic two weeks at Camp Roberts and accomplished a great deal for Sahana. This included the use of a $400 (two years ago price) eeePC/Netbook as our primary data collection server, pulling WMS layers from mosaiced and geo-referenced UAV and satellite imagery of the Camp Roberts experiment site, configured an SMS gateway running on a Windows-based server using Cygwin and SMSTools and a Nokia 3220 phone to send and receive SMS messages from Sahana, an Android application to send in structured SMS messages to Sahana with embedded GPS coordinates, exporting of a KML feed from Sahana to Google earth to name a few of the new functionality we added.

The new SMS capabilities which I worked on gives Sahana the ability to serve as an incredibly powerful crowdsourcing and disaster situation awareness application. New SMS functionality included:

• A new format for a structured SMS message to be sent from any cell phone to Sahana.
• The ability to register a user name to a cellphone number.
• The mapping of the SMS messages to a DHS symbolset of incident information based on feature class reported by the Android and SMS message.
• We developed the ability to poll the Sahana server and pull information about the last known location of a registered Sahana user
• Or the search of the last know report based on a keyword

This all was applied in an integrated field experiment and was also present to some key representatives from organizations such as FEMA and DHS

You can find the full details and pictures on Mark's talksahana post here:

http://talksahana.com/?p=303