Sahana foss disaster management system

Sahana is an open source disaster management system which is deployed to manage number of disaster situations all over the world.

Initially it was developed to manage the situation occurred in the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster which was occurred in the 26^th of December in 2009. Lanka software foundations did the initial development of the Sahana phase-1 with the help of many organizations and the volunteers from various parts of the world. At that time there were no other free software which can support to handle all the situations as handling victims, managing camps, manging the volunteers, manging the NGOs like wise. So this was a better solution for all of this issues.

Initially Sahana contained 7 modules to help the management of the disaster. Those are

1. Missing Person Registry - Helping to reduce trauma by effectively finding missing persons

2. Organization Registry - Coordinating and balancing the distribution of relief organizations in the affected areas and connecting relief groups allowing them to operate as one

3. Request Management System - Registering and Tracking all incoming requests for support and relief up to fulfillment and helping donors connect to relief requirements

4. Camp Registry - Tracking the location and numbers of victims in the various camps and temporary shelters setup all around the affected area

5. Volunteer Management - Coordinate the contact info, skills, assignments and availability of volunteers and responders

6. Inventory Management - Tracking the location, quantities, expiry of supplies stored for utilization in a disaster

7. Situation Awareness - Providing a GIS overview of the situation at hand for the benefit of the decision makers

But now it has more than 20 modules and day by day it is increasing its scope to be more reliable and useful for the society.

You can visit here and get an overview about the project.

This was successfully deployed in the following situations occurred in the past years .

1. Tsunami - Sri Lanka 2005 - Officially deployed in the CNO for the Government of Sri Lanka

2. AsianQuake - Pakistan 2005 - Officially deployed within with NADRA for the Government of Pakistan

3. Southern Leyte Mudslide Disaster - Philippines 2006 - Officially deployed with the NDCC and ODC for the Government of Philippines

4. Sarvodaya - Sri Lanka 2006 - Deployed for Sri Lanka's largest NGO

5. Terre des Hommes - Sri Lanka 2006 - Deployed with new Child Protection Module

6. Yogjarkata Earthquake - Indonesia 2006 - Deployed by ACS, urRemote and Indonesian whitewater association and Indonesian Rescue Source

7. New York City - 2007-08 – Pre-deployed in support of the City of New York’s Coastal Storm Plan

8. Peru Ica Earthquake - 2007 - Deployed for the Government of Peru

9. Chendu - Shizuan Province Earthquake 2008 - Deployed by Chendgu Police

10. Haiti earth quack 2010

This is an web base system and the initial developments were done in Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl. But now it is redeveloped using python thechnology and it was callled as SahanaPy.

Now the Sahana software Foundation was initiated to take care of the Sahana project and it will be a great step for the future of Sahana.

The source code can be downloaded from here using CVS

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@sahana.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/sahana co -r gsoc_2009 -P sahana

and the it can be run using the wamp/lamp server. Here are some tips to run the source code.

When it initially set up, it automatically creates a data base and the accordance tables in the server so now it is ready to give it's services.

So try it and join to the Sahana community to help the people when the really needs you.