Sahana Membership
Sahana will be transitioning to a membership based model by at which time all PMC members will be invited to become members of the Sahana foundation.
Project Management Committee June 2006 to Feburary 2009
The role of the Project Management Committee (PMC) is to ensure that the community is behaving and governing itself in a manner that is consistent with the objectives of making Sahana a successful open source project. This includes operational, legal and procedural oversight on Sahana releases. Sahana is a meritocracy on contribution and the members of the PMC represent those who have made the most substantial and long term contributions to Sahana in the form of development, deployment, testing, documentation and otherwise.
PMC Members:
Chamindra has been involved in the Sahana Project from inception following the 2004 Asian Tsunami that affected Sri Lanka. Subsequently he took the role of project lead cum chief architect and lead a complete re-write of the Sahana system into a generic and modular disaster management system, seeing it deployed also with the Governments and various NGOs in Pakistan (2005 Asian Quake), Philippines (2006 Mudslide Disaster), Indonesia (2006 Yogjarkata earthquake) and Sri Lanka (Terre des Hommes, Sarvodaya, Red Cross, CNO). He co-founded the Humanitarian-FOSS community (now 150+ strong) with Paul Currion along the more generic aspirations of applying FOSS to solve Humanitarian problems. He has co-authored several publications on Sahana and the concept of Humanitarian-FOSS in IEEE, CACM and BCS journals / magazines.
Past roles Chamindra has played includes the acting Executive Director of the Lanka Software Foundation, the global R&D manager at Virtusa (a 3000+ strong software IT consulting and technology services MNC headquartered in Boston, MA) and a Researcher at the Hardware Compilation Group of Computer Science lab at Oxford University. Other FOSS involvements include being an Apache committer (AXIS), a Google Summer of code mentor, a contributor to Taprobane (A Debian based distro), a contributor to the UNDP IOSN Portal (Humanitarian / Sri Lanka Sections), a member of the Ubuntu Sri Lankan loco team and strong advocate for FOSS in Sri Lanka. He has also been a delegate/representative of Sri Lanka in various conferences and forums including AsiaOSS Symposiums, UNDP IOSN, ISCRAM, UN WSIS, Emergency Management Asia and ISCRAM. He is the founder secretary of the IEEE computer society Sri Lankan Chapter and also supported the information security working group of the Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) of Sri Lanka. Chamindra is a Red Cross volunteer
Chamindra graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford University, where he earned a degree in Engineering & Computer Science.
Pradeeper is a long standing Free/Open Source Software [FOSS] advocate and contributor in Sri Lanka. He is a committee member of the Lanka Linux User (
LUG), which is the largest community of Linux volunteers in Sri Lanka and has participated in many FOSS advocacy
events both as a speaker and organizer. Pradeeper also contributes globally as a Google Summer of Code (
GSoC) mentor and the main
coordinator of the SOC for
Lanka Software Foundation. He has more than 10 years of experience working as a system engineer and consultant both in the private and government sector in Sri Lanka. Since 2005, Pradeeper joined the Sahana project as one of it's leading contributors in the core team and has been involved in the deployments of Sahana globally. He contributes also to the operational aspects of the project including the administration of Sahana websites, all Sahana servers, Sahana code repositories and packaging/release of Sahana releases.
Ravindra de Silva
Email: ravindra [at] opensource [dot] lk
Ravindra joined the Sahana project in 2005 with the inception of Phase 2 as a core team member and took the lead in 2006 Philippines Guinsaugon landslides deployment and Sarvodaya pre-deployment. Among his other affiliations he serves as a visiting lecturer ,Department of Computer Science & Engineering,University of Moratuwa , Sri Lanka.
Currently he also serves as a work group chair of 9th Asia Pacific Networking Group(APNG) camp (www.apng.org) and secretary of Lanka Internet Network Group(www.lking.lk). Ravindra has over 5 years industry experience in mainly research and development. under the guidance of Professor Louiqa Raschid he has co-authored several international research papers. He has been a speaker/presenter at events in USA, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
Over the past years Ravindra has played IT consultancy roles to many firms in Sri Lanka including Galadari Hotel Limited, Citibank N.A., DMS Electronics (Pvt) Ltd Creative Software Solutions, Communication Policy Research South (CPRsouth). In 2004, he served as a member of the video encoding research team at British Telecom , UK on H.264 encoding. He has a B.Sc. first class honors degree in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.
Mifan Careem was involved with the Sahana project since its inception in January 2005, for the Sahana-Phase1 stage. He then joined the Sahana-Phase2 in August 2005, and has since been an active member of the Sahana community and the core team, whilst being the GIS development lead of the project. Mifan is also an active member of the Sahana research team which has produced many international research papers, and has represented Sahana in many conferences and events, including events at Indonesia, U.S.A and the Philippines.
Mifan is also an active and longstanding member of the Lanka Linux User Group and the Sri Lanka Free and Open Source Consortium, where he has organized and chaired many events. Being an avid FOSS advocate, Mifan has presented at many FOSS events around the country. He is a recipient of the coveted Google Summer of Code award for his contribution to the Sahana GIS module in 2005, and has mentored many FOSS projects as well.
Mifan is a graduate of the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.
Louiqa Raschid is a Professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. She holds appointments in the Smith School of Business, the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Louiqa has been a member of the Sahana team since January 2005 and has been the database architect/advisor for Sahana. She has co-authored several papers on the Sahana architecture and has identified key challenges for disaster data management (DisDM) to be addressed within the context of Sahana. She has a diversity of research interests focused around issues of information (data and knowledge) management, semantics and data integration, and performance. She investigates applications in the life sciences, health information systems, humanitarian IT applications and Grid computing. Her research utilizes a variety of methodologies and reference sub-areas such as optimization, large scale simulation using trace data, semantics and logic based reasoning, and data analysis techniques.
Her research has been published in journals and conferences including ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, AAAI, IEEE ICDE, ACM TODS, IEEE TKDE, IEEE ToC, the Journal of Logic Programming, and the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. Her research is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. She has been a Visiting Scientist/Professor at the French National Laboratories for Information Sciences (INRIA), Hewlett Packard Research Labs, Stanford Research Institute, and Humboldt University in Berlin. She serves on the editorial board of ACM Computing Surveys, the Very Large Data Base Journal, IEEE TKDE and the ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality.
Don Cameron
Email: donc [at] internode [dot] on [dot] net
Don spent ten years as a fire brigade Captain with the NSW Rural Fire Service, was promoted to Group Officer, Superintendent, and later progressed to Regional Officer with command and coordination responsibilities for 11,000 fire-fighters. Don has extensive disaster management experience gained through more than two decades of working in the field and emergency operations centres managing floods, fires, aircraft, major traffic and hazardous chemical incidents, storm events, natural and man-made disasters including some the largest Fire-Storms in Australian modern history. Don has been a member of the Sahana team since February 2005.
Don's background includes tertiary studies in emergency management,information systems management, fire cause determination and business management. A member of the International Association of Arson Investigators, he is certified in ICS, Emergency Leadership, SCBA; is an experienced disaster planner, aerial observation analyst, responder, CISM manager (Critical Incident Stress), operational train-the-trainer and emergency communications systems designer. Don has chaired Local and District Fire Management Committees, participated on Emergency Management Committees and contributed to the development of Australian DisPlans (Local, State and National Disaster-Plans). As Superintendent he designed and managed emergency communications and control centres; the construction of GPS, wireless and mobile enabled disaster response and forward-command vehicles. During 1995 Don worked with CSIRO scientists and was instrumental in the proof-of-concept design of systems incorporating ARMS (automated real-time mapping systems), GPS, mobile telephony and real-time data transfers as a toolkit to empower disaster mitigation through improved real-time data transfers from aerial reconnaissance operations.
Not content with existing disaster management systems, during 1997 Don established the role of 'IT Special Projects Officer' within the RFS. In this position he coordinated ICS trainers and incident coordination teams to establish the prerequisites for a computerised methodology for ICS; a computerized model for establishing a 'Standards of Fire Cover' (a fire pre-planning tool used to assess fire cover requirements based on risk analysis) and logistical tools for mitigating risk to people and property's surrounding public lands. During the later part of the '90's he extended this work in a consultancy capacity and commenced developing the freeware 'Emergency Management System'; a modular disaster management tool providing facilities in support of ICS command and response, logistics, hazard identification, staff and volunteer management, training, resource and financial support for any type of disaster. EMS provides several of the domain methodologies employed within Sahana and is still used by many emergency operations centres today.
Recognising the value to disaster management of developments in public ICT infrastructure, open source and other community networking initiatives, Don spent 2000-2001 assisting in the establishment of Community Telecentre's andr ural/remote ISP's. This work was recognised by the NSW Innovation Council as an outstanding community contribution. Don has several papers published on Community Informatics in the texts "Community Networking and Community Informatics" and "Using Community Informatics for Regional Transformation". He contributed in a technical capacity to the Australian national livestock identification project to prevent Pandemic, and demonstrated his commitment to Open Source by working with local community groups to establish Australia's first OSS Telecentre Youth Cafe.
Don currently works on ICT systems and developments relating to safety, production, disaster response and mitigation in the Underground Mining Industry. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Community Informatics, and since November 2001 has been a TechSoup forum host and advisor to US-based NPO's seeking technical disaster recovery assistance. He has several articles published on TechSoup. Don is a Life Member of two Rural Fire Brigades for services rendered and continues to provide support to persons impacted by disaster in an operational capacity. Don is a strong advocate for volunteerism as a tool for personal, professional and social development.
Gavin is a Director of Kestrel Group – a risk and emergency management consultancy that operates in New Zealand and the South Pacific. His background includes tertiary studies in management science, information systems, geographical information systems (GIS) and emergency management. He has worked for a wide range of clients across a number of sectors – including central and local government, health, utility and private businesses. His areas of pecialtise include: response planning; exercise development, delivery and reporting; information communications technology for emergency management including geographical information systems (GIS).
Gavin is a member of the International Association of Emergency Managers, and has been involved on the International Development Committee, Communications Committee, Website Taskforce and the formation of the Oceania region. Additionally he belongs to the Association for Computing Machinery, New Zealand Computer Society, the New Zealand Open Source Society, the New Zealand Society for Risk Management, and the Spatial Sciences Institute. He is also currently President of the New Zealand Recreational GPS Society.He is a certified Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) Category 1 Responder, and has been a Civil Defence Emergency Management (CDEM) volunteer for nearly ten years. One of his recent roles was in a team that manages light USAR response teams.
Paul Currion runs a consultancy specializing in information management for humanitarian operations (www.humanitarian.info). He has most recently worked under contract to UNICEF on behalf of the WASH Cluster, providing information management support in Bangladesh for Cyclone Sidr and developing Cluster training.
From 2005-2007, Paul was Manager of Initiative 4 of the Emergency Capacity Building Project of the Interagency Working Group[1], developing ways of improving NGO use of ICT to respond to emergencies (http://www.ecbproject.org). For the first half of 2005, he was the Regional Information Manager for WFP for the Indian Ocean Tsunami response, managing the regional Emergency Preparedness intranet (EPWeb) and developing innovative responses to key organisational challenges.
Previously, he developed the concept of the Humanitarian Information Centre (HICs) for the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), setting up and managing HICs in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Liberia. He also wrote the IASC statement that formalised the HIC as a key part of the UN’s response to emergencies, wrote the HIC Handbook and developed the HIC training package (www.humanitarianinfo.org).
Paul draws on a range of experience, including humanitarian relief, human rights, conflict resolution, training development and NGO coordination. He has worked for UN offices (including OCHA, WFP and UNICEF), the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), NGO co-ordination bodies (including the International Council for Voluntary Agencies and the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief), donors (such as DFID), and a range of international NGOs.
[1] An NGO consortium comprising CARE, Save the Children, Oxfam, World Vision, International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps and Catholic Relief Services.
Joseph Priyanga
Email: jo [at] opensource [dot] com
Joseph got to know about Sahana when he joined Lanka Software Foundation(LSF) as a Intern in January 2006, from that point onwards he has become a active contributor and a committer for Sahana. He later joined LSF as a full time developer to contribute for Sahana and now he is contributing as a volunteer.
Apart from development he has contributed as a UI designer and CSS maintainer for Sahana. He has also worked with local NGO's to adopt Sahana and also involved with some of the Sahana deployments. Also he is a Free Software fanatic who promotes GNU/Linux and other free software.
Ishan has been involved with the Sahana Project since February 2007. He got to know about its recognition and reputation during his university internships and was interested to join with the Sahana team. He is also interested FOSS and likes to share his knowledge with others. He is particularly passionate about GNU/Linux both as a developer and user. He was successfully completed a Google Summer of Code project in 2007 and also has contributed few gadgets to Google Desktop. He is also certified programmer for JAVA platforms. He is also a member of Lanka Linux user group.
Ishan is a graduate of University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Tom Worthington is an
Adjunct Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the Australian National University. Tom
provided advice on the web interface for Sahana in 2005 and sponsored its use during the
May 2006 Indonesian earthquake. Tom consults to governments and industry on ICT policy. He lectures on
web site design and
electronic commerce systems, and has supervised research on the
emergency use of the web. In 2000 Tom was an expert witness at the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission hearing on the design of the
Sydney 2000 Olympics web site and has been consulted on the design of the
Beijing 2008 Olympics web site.
Tom is a past president and Honorary Life Member of the Australian Computer Society, a voting member of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is the founding chair of the Australian Computer Society's Green Technology Group and the Director of Professional Development. In 1999 Tom was elected a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society for his contribution to the development of public Internet policy.
Fran Boon
Email: flavour [at] partyvibe [dot] com
Fran has devoted much of the last 10 years of his life to managing the support of IT & Telecommunications systems across Oxfam GB's 150 networked field offices - ensuring reliability for both humanitarian & long-term development programmes against a backdrop of challenging environments. In his spare time he has worked on various Open Source/Open Data projects & workshops including Asterisk, Inveneo, OpenStreetMap, AfricaSource & AsiaSource.
Mahesh Kaluarachchi
Email: mahesh [at] opensource [dot] com
Mahesh has been involving with SAHANA FOSS disaster management system since February 2006 for the SAHANA-Phase 2 stage. He joined with SAHANA as an intern and he is a SAHANA committer and a SAHANA core team member since August 2006. Mahesh developed the Inventory Management module in SAHANA and he is a recipient of Google Summer of Code 2006 award. The award was given for the development of “Inventory Optimization in Disaster Management” enhancement.
Mahesh is an active and highly adaptable Software Engineer who strengthens in FOSS mobile technologies, Web technologies and FOSS content management systems. He is also a successful team player and having very good planning and organizing skills as well. He has played a vital role as an organizing committee member in Sri Lankan FOSS events.
Mahesh is a graduate of the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.
Mark Prutsalis
Email: mark [at] globaliist [dot] com
Mark has over 15 years of operational humanitarian relief and emergency management experience following major international and domestic natural and man-made disasters. He has a proven record of implementing complex operational projects in diverse and austere post-disaster environments through leadership, planning and appropriate use of tools and technology. He has also led and managed several planning, preparedness and mitigation projects, including tabletop and functional exercise design for governments, military, international organizations, and the public and private sector. Mark is a skilled trainer and has delivered both emergency management and operational end-user training in several subject areas, including emergency communications, security, continuity of operations, and humanitarian information system applications.
Mark has led humanitarian assistance missions in response to diverse natural disasters such as Hurricanes Mitch in Central America and Katrina/Rita in the United States, volcanic eruptions in Ecuador, earthquakes in Pakistan, Turkey, Taiwan and India, and the 2004 Asian tsunami in India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Mark has also responded to man-made disasters and conflicts in Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Central Africa, Southern Sudan and East Timor. For the past several years, he has been managing several emergency planning and preparedness projects for the City of New York, including for their Office of Emergency Management, Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. He has specific sectoral expertise in needs assessment, logistics management, humanitarian information systems, staff and site security, IT & telecommunications, and program administration.
Mark led the humanitarian mission to Sri Lanka for the IBM Crisis Response Team following the 2004 Asian tsunami and, in partnership with the Lanka Software Foundation, helped design the requirements and planned for the deployment of the first version of Sahana within weeks of the tsunami. Mark also manages the use of Sahana by the City of New York to manage staffing assignments and victim registration at hurricane shelters as part of the City’s Coastal Storm Plan, and supported the deployment and customization of Sahana following disasters in Pakistan (2005 earthquake), the Philippines (2006 mudslides), Indonesia (2006 earthquake), Peru (2007 earthquake), and Bangladesh (2007 cyclone).
Prabath Kumarasinghe
Email: prabath [at] opensource [dot] com
Prabath was involved with the Sahana project in 2007 and worked as a core team member and an active contributor. He has contribute to several Sahana deployments and has actively been involved in the Sahana internationalization and localization work. He is a recipient of the Google Summer of Code award.
He holds Bachelor of Computer Science degree from the University of Colombo School of Computing, Cisco Certified Network Associate CCNA and professional diploma in IT holder from NIIT.
Sanjeewa Jayasinghe
Email: sditfac [at] opensource [dot] lk
Sanjeewa was involved in SAHANA phase-2 since 2006, February and he is a core team member since 2006, August. He has been developing the Catalog system and Reporting system which are released as core modules of Sahana disaster management system. He is a recipient of Google summer of Code 2006 award, for the Sahana reporting module.
Sanjeewa is an active and highly adaptable software engineer who has expertise in FOSS Content management systems, mobile technologies and web technologies. Mainly he has working experience as a consultant for several IT companies and application developer using LAMP and J2EE technologies. He is an effective communicator plus and successful team player with strong collaborative team building skills. Thus, over past years he was involved in organizing FOSS events in Sri Lanka.
Sanjeewa Jayasinghe graduated from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka with honors degree of Information Technology.
Sudheera joined the Sahana project as a volunteer in January 2005. He joined Lanka Software Foundation as a core team member of the Sahana Phase 2 in August 2005. Sudheera also contributed as a mentor for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). He is also a member of the Lanka Linux User Group (LUG.lk) and Foss.lk. Currently he spends his spare time advocating and promoting Free Software.
Isuru Samaraweera
Email: isuru [at] opensource [dot] com
Isuru joined the Sahana project in 2006, from phase 2 as a core team member. Since then he has been an active member of the Sahana community and lead the development of various important modules of the project. Also he actively takes part in various core Sahana deployments Terre des homes and Peru deployements.Further he brings 3 years of Industry experience compose of 1.5 Java/JEE experience and 1.5 years of LAMP experience. Isuru is also an active member of the Sahana research activities and so far has produced an international research paper, and presented in the ISCRAM 2007 conference. Further he has represented Sahana in many conferences and events, including events at China and Netherlands. He has mentored several GSOC projects in 2007 and represented the project at the GSOC mentor summit held in Google inc,California USA.
Isuru is a graduate in Computer science and engineering from the university of Moratuwa and currently pursuing post graduate studies in Computer Science.
Ravith Botejue
Email: ravithb [at] gmail [dot] com>
Ravith joined the Sahana core team as an associate software engineer in September 2007. His interests include, information security in applications and computer networks, electronics, robotics, aeronautics, avionics and microcontroller programming. He is a member of the Lanka Linux User Group and the Sri Lanka Aeronautical Society.
Before Joining sahana Ravith worked as a trainee software developer at Eurocenter DDC LTD (SL), where he was mainly involved in research and development of a business intelligence portal for the organization itself. He has also worked an assistant lecturer at Esoft Computer Studies (Pvt) Ltd.
Ravith holds a first class degree in Information Technology from the University of Colombo School of Computing, a diploma in electrical and electronic engineering from City & Guilds UK, and a Java Programmer certification from Sun Microsystems USA.
Trishan de Lanerolle
Email: Trishan [dot] deLanerolle [at] trincoll [dot] edu
Trishan has associated with the Sahana project since January 2006, helping to establish the team at Trinity College (CT) who developed the Volunteer Management module. He is the Director of “The Humanitarian FOSS Project”, a National Science Foundation funded community-building project that was started by a group of computing faculty and open source proponents. The project’s goal is to build an academic community to revitalize interest in undergraduate Computing through Free Open Source Software (FOSS) applied to humanitarian applications. He is experienced in working with open source technologies in an educational setting and has organized and supervised summer humanitarian open source internships for undergraduates. Trishan is a graduate in Computer science from Trinity College, Hartford, USA. He has published and co-authored papers on topics related to Computer Science education to several conferences and journals.
Dominic joined the Sahana project as a volunteer in March 2008. He has initiated the new internationalization process and currently operates the
Online Translation Site and maintaines the Sahana Language Pack.
Dominic is a nurse from Germany, with long-term experience in intensive medicine and care for the critically ill. As a matter of this professional background, he is also interested in health management features of Sahana. Dominic is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation
David Bitner
Email: Bitner [at] geospatial [dot] com
David has been involved with Sahana since being invited to work with the Sahana team at the Strong Angel III exercises in 2006. Since that time, David has been involved with the Sahana GIS team working to create a strong architecture for development.
David is a certified GIS Professional (GISP) who has been working with GIS and remote sensing technologies since 1997. David has been working with various open source GIS projects including MapServer, PostGIS, and OpenLayers since 2002. Currently David works as the GIS Coordinator for the Metropolitan Airports Commission -- an airport authority for seven airports in Minneapolis, MN, USA. David also runs dbSpatial -- providing GIS, internet, and spatial database consultancy services. David is currently chair and of the Public Geospatial Data project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and is active in the Minnesota local chapter of OSGeo as well as various other activities with OSGeo. David sits on the Coordinating committee of MetroGIS -- a Twin Cities, MN regional government data organization -- as well as the Geospatial Architecture, Standards, and Emergency Preparedness committees of the Minnesota Governor's Council on Geographic Information.
Nuwan Waidyantha
Email: Waidyanatha [at] gmail [dot] com
Inception to Sahana was with the HazInfo project (http://lirneasia.net/projects/2006-07/evaluating-last-mile-hazard-information-dissemination-hazinfo/); where we developed a CAP GUI for setting up templates to be used in the research project. Present Sahana work revolves around the Messaging Module. Expertise are in ICT system design and actionable research working collaboratively with multiple national and international partners applying the academic and industrial experience. Main areas of interest are in early warning systems with an emphasis on emergency communication and adoption of standards such as Common Alerting Protocol. Preset project involves piloting a real-time biosurveillance program (http://lirneasia.net/projects/2008-2010/evaluating-a-real-time-biosurveillance-program/); through which a Biosurveillance Module will be contributed to the Sahana code base. My bio and resume (http://lirneasia.net/profiles/nuwan-waidyanatha/). My blog (http://waidyanatha.blogspot.com/). Currently residing in Kunming, China.
![Greg Miernicki]()
Greg Miernicki
Email: g [at] miernicki [dot] com
Greg joined the Sahana core team in May 2009 as a Software Developer working at NIH in Washington DC. Greg's role at NIH working in the National Library of Medicine is to develop software for the
Lost Person Finder project. The project has has many moving pieces which act together to form a disaster management system for cases where information must be shared amongst many hospitals and other organizations.
Greg's primary contributions to Sahana so far have come in the form of modular development on the Sahana trunk code, maintaining the en_US english translation, and participating in discussions that further drive the development of Sahana.
Greg holds a BS of Computer Science from UMBC. Besides programming, his other interests include audio production and sailing.
