Sahana Disaster Management System - Core Developer Team

From Document Freedom Day

1 Country
2 City
3 About
4 Website

Country

Sri Lanka

City

Colombo

About

Sahana is a disaster management system that grew out of the 2004 Asian Tsunami disaster. In Sri Lanka, volunteers put together the Sahana Disaster Management System to help track families and coordinate work among relief organizations during and after the tsunami disaster.

The Sahana system is developed on a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) platform using the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) software stack and is made available as FOSS itself. A major advantage of having a FOSS disaster management system is that it can be readily distributed, localized and customized according to the requirements of the region or community using it and poor countries can also afford to use it. Sahana consists of several modules of integrated web-based disaster management applications aimed at facilitating the management of missing people and disaster victims; managing and administrating various organizations; managing camps; and managing requests and assistance in the supply chain management.

The success of Sahana and its availability as FOSS opens up the possibility of international aid and relief organizations as well as national governments to have a single cohesive disaster management system. This will make disaster management and the associated relief effort much more efficient. It will also allow regions that frequently experience natural disasters to better prepare themselves to deal with the disasters as and when they arise.

The Sahana Project has inspired the concept of “humanitarian-FOSS”. This is a term used to denote the application of FOSS to alleviate human suffering.

Sahana has been deployed in government, NGO, UN and volunteer community level in many countries including Pakistan, Philippines,Indonesia, Peru, Lebanon, United States, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Sahana project has won many awards and international recognition including, Free Software Foundation's award for Social Benefit, Google Summer of Code, Asia Source II, Strong Angel III, SourceForge Project of the Month in June 2006, Sand Hill Good Samaritans Award and Africa Source II award.

The project was listed under the Top 10 Open source companies in 2005 by NetworkWorld and nominated as a finalist for the Stockholm Challenge 2006.