Roberta J. WittySometimes the best things in life are still free, and good news can come from surprising sources.
On Tuesday, Rick DeLotto and I were briefed by the Sahana Project, an award winning, free and open source, web-based disaster relief management system designed to “Help alleviate human suffering and help save lives through the efficient use of IT during a disaster”. It was first developed by the open source community, and is maintained by volunteers, with support from IBM, Google, NSF and Sida. You should run right over to Sahana and get a look at it, tell your friends, and spread the word. It might be just what your home town needs to keep YOU safe.
So far Sahana has quite a track record since its introduction in 2005; it has helped manage disaster outcomes in Sri Lanka, The Philippines, Indonesia Peru and Myanmar. It has been selected for use by the City of New York, Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority, The Disaster Management Bureau of Bangladesh, the Disaster Management Center of Sri Lanka and Indonesia’s NDCC and by various agencies across the EU, South America, Australia and China. It is available in 30 languages, has very limited infrastructure requirements, and can be run effectively on systems ranging from a simple laptop (with data exchange by USB drives) to satellite-linked client server.
As shown to us it has 4 main modules:
* Organization Registry, which helps maintain data (contact data, services offered, region, etc) of organizations, groups and volunteers working in the disaster
* Missing Persons / Disaster Victim Registry, which helps the authorities track and find missing, deceased, injured and displaced people and families
* Shelter Registry, a central repository for data on all temporary shelters setup following the disaster, and
* Request Management System, which tracks all requests and helps match pledges for support, aid and supplies to fulfillment.
Other modules include inventory management, volunteer coordination and situational awareness for incident managers, with more in the pipeline.
This is a non-profit, volunteer organization—and you or one of your professional organizations might have some skills, resources or spare time to help.
Category: BCM and IT DRM Research Coverage Tags: Availability Risk, Backup and Recovery, BCM, BCP, BIA, Business Continuity Management, Business Continuity Planning, Business Impact Analysis, Business Resiliency, Contingency Planning, Continuity of Operations, COOP, Crisis Management, Data Protection, Disaster Recovery, Emergency Notification, Emergency Preparedness, Incident Management, IT Disaster Recovery, Mass Notification, Operational Risk Management, Pandemic Planning, Recovery Planning, Recovery Plans, Resiliency, Risk Assessment, Workforce Continuity
3 responses so far ↓
1 Gavin Treadgold April 23, 2009 at 7:58 pm
Hi Roberta – thanks for promoting our cause!
I’d like to add that over time, I hope we can implement some functionality to support BCM as well. Many of the organisations that require Sahana capabilities have legal responsibilities to provide response and recovery services to communities. Of course, to be able to do this, they also need to be able to manage their own personnel preparedness and business continuity to be able to effectively provide response. So, in the long term, we hope to provide Sahana as a one-stop system to manage both emergency management as well as business continuity – especially when there is so much crossover.
With the open source approach, it would only take one organisation to fund the development of one BC module, and all other organisations using Sahana would be able to benefit from it.
As budgets in the risk domain tighten with the troubled economies, this may provide a more cost effective means of providing capable IT solutions for risk, continuity and emergency management.
Cheers Gavin
2 Sahana blogged by Gartner’s Roberta Witty « Living Prepared™ April 24, 2009 at 8:17 am
[...] sahana The Gartner Group’’s Roberta Witty recently blogged on Sahana in “Sahana: A Free, Open Source Disaster Relief Management System” following a conference call I participated in with her this past Tuesday along with fellow [...]
3 talksahana » Sahana blogged by Gartner’s Roberta Witty April 24, 2009 at 8:19 am
[...] Gartner Group’’s Roberta Witty recently blogged on Sahana in “Sahana: A Free, Open Source Disaster Relief Management System” following a conference call I participated in with her this past Tuesday along with fellow [...]