SAHANA - Free and Open Source Disaster Management System

Sahana Software Foundation a Mentoring Organization for the 2010 Google Summer of Code

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:25:49 -0600

The Sahana Software Foundation has again been selected as a mentoring organization for the 2010 Google Summer of Code. We are thrilled to be selected to participate in such a great program that helps bring new developers into open source projects. Sahana has benefited greatly from participating in GSOC since 2006, and we are working to expand our pool of mentors this year so we can support even more GSOC projects and students.

Please visit our main GSOC page on our wiki for more information.

Interested Students: If you are a student who is interested in participating in the GSoC this year, we would encourage you to review our ideas pages and our student guidelines on the Sahana Wiki. Once you have reviewed that information, we invite you to discuss any ideas that you may have on the Sahana developers mailing list or via IRC (#sahana on Freenode). See http://www.sahanafoundation.org/chat) for more information. Students who take the opportunity to discuss their ideas with the Sahana development team will definitely have an easier time pulling together quality proposals.

Interested Mentors: If you are an active Sahana Contributor and would like to be involved in the GSoC as a mentor, please first sign up on our mentor's list. Former Sahana GSOC students are strongly encouraged to serve as mentors this year as we will not be considering GSOC applications from former Sahana GSOC students. Please also post your ideas for projects you would be interested in mentoring to the ideas pages.

More announcements will be made here and on the wiki.

Sahana Response to Haiti and Chile

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:59:16 -0700

The Sahana Community is responding to the disasters in Haiti and Chile. Please visit and http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org and http://chile.sahanafoundation.org. We are happy to work with anyone who needs Sahana for a deployment in Haiti or Chile.

We are live online on the freenode #sahana IRC channel where you can chat with the community. If you do not have an IRC client access this channel through the web on http://www.sahana.lk/chat.

Donate
We appreciate your donations of time, effort, resources and money in support of this effort

Sahana Finalist in Sourceforge 2009 Community Choice Awards

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:09:42 -0600

Sahana has been selected as a finalist in the SourceForge 2009 Community Choice Awards in the Best Project for Government section. If you see value in Sahana as a tool and would like to help get it more recognized out there, please do support us by clicking on the vote button below:

Vote for Sahana

Sahana booklet commemorates the early years and initial contributions

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:13:13 -0600

The Lanka Software Foundation released the Sahana booklet to mark the occasion of the transition of Sahana to an independent foundation.
The booklet recounts the early years of the Sahana FOSS project and acknowledges the contributions of individuals and organizations to the success of Sahana.

Sahana to transition to an independent foundation

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:11:01 -0600

Following three years of incubation by the Lanka Software Foundation, Sahana is ready to transition to an independent foundation.
At a meeting in Sri Lanka on March 27 2009, an interim Sahana transition Board, chaired by Brent Woodworth, was given the mandate to set up an independent foundation.

Sahana GSoC Students Announced

Sun, 10 May 2009 08:48:26 -0600

Sahana Community,

It is my pleasure to announce the students who will be participating in this years Google Summer of Code for Sahana. We received 45 applicants from eight different countries this year for only 10 spots. I would like to personally congratulate both those who we are able to bring into the GSoC program as well as all the other applicants as the field of candidates was truly outstanding. We look forward to working with these students throughout the summer and hope to form relationships that last for years to come for Sahana and the Humanitarian ICT communities. We thank all the students who have applied for this program and apologize that we were only able to accept such a limited number.

The following students have been accepted for this years program:

Kethees Selladurai
Ajay Kumar
Khushbu Mohta
Praneeth Bodduluri
Gihan Chamara
Hasanat Kazmi
Shree Kant Bohra
Nithin Dara
Iroshan Horathalge
Akshit Sharma

Descriptions of these projects can be found at http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/sahana .
Thank you,
David Bitner
Sahana PMC
Sahana Google Summer of Code Administrator

Sahana is a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2009 Mentoring Organization

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:09:43 -0600

Sahana has been again selected to participate in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for 2009. We were selected as 1 of 150 out of about 400 groups who applied this year. This is a strong testament to the reputation that Sahana has built up of the last few years and the great success that we have had as part of this program previously. We still do not know how many students we will be able to involve this year, but it may likely be fewer than we have had in the past as there are fewer spots to go around.

Interested Students: If you are a student who is interested in participating in the GSoC this year, we would encourage you to review our ideas page and our student guidelines on the Sahana Wiki.
http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php?id=dev:sahana_gsoc09_ideas
http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php?id=dev:sahana_gsoc09_student_guidelines

Once you have reviewed that information, we invite you to discuss any ideas that you may have on the Sahana maindev mailing list or via IRC (#sahana on Freenode or via http://sahana.lk/chat). Students who take the opportunity to discuss their ideas with the Sahana development team will definitely have an easier time pulling together quality proposals.

Mentors: If you are an active Sahana Contributor and would still like to be involved in the GSoC as a mentor, it's not too late. Please visit http://socghop.appspot.com/org/apply_mentor/google/gsoc2009 to register and we will also get you caught up on all pertinent information you need to know about.

A full timeline of important dates for this summer can be found here: http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/program/google/gsoc2009/timeline.

SAHANA 2009 - Software for Disaster Management

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:48:58 -0600

The Free and Open Source Software Community of Sri Lanka is hosting SAHANA 2009, the 1st Annual SAHANA Conference on March 24 & 25, 2009. In its inaugural year, the conference will provide opportunities for anyone involved in Disaster/Emergency management to network and share best practices with each other.

The conference is aptly named SAHANA, meaning Relief in Sinhala, an official language of Sri Lanka, and is named after the SAHANA Disaster Management System, which was created as a Free/Open Source software solution in response to the 2004 South Asian Tsunami.

For more details and to register for the Conference and the Barcamp, please visit the Conference Site

0.6.2.2 released

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 06:44:46 -0700

The latest version of the Stable branch of the Sahana code is now available for download through Sourceforge.

Volunteers and Deployers for China and Myanmar/Burma

Thu, 29 May 2008 13:24:37 -0600

If you are interested in deploying Sahana in these disasters, or supporting an existing deployment, we encourage you to join our mailing lists. This will help you to benefit from the deployment experience and technical expertise that the wider community can provide, as well as allowing the community to learn from your own experience.

By participating in these community discussions, we will be able to avoid communication breakdowns and make sure that the Sahana response is more effective. The additional benefit of doing the localization on a public mailing list is that most of the translation work can be shared, improving productivity. We will shortly make available web tools to support collaboration during the translation effort.

We'd particularly recommend you join the the sahana-user list (subscribe at: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sahana-user), but you can join other lists you might find relevant at http://www.sahana.lk/community.

Sahana Response to China and Myanmar/Burma

Thu, 29 May 2008 13:22:23 -0600

Currently we are aware of and working with local teams to customize Sahana in one instance in China and two separate instances in Myanmar. Most of the work has been with regard to the localization (mainly translation) of Sahana, carried out predominantly local teams with some guidance from the Sahana core developers. These local teams include staff and volunteers of InSTEDD, IBM-China/BCRA/Foundation, Trinity College Connecticut, Lanka Software Foundation, DUMBO Project Thailand and ReliefAsia.

In China, IBM has a dedicated team working around the clock to configure Sahana for the Chengdu local government. In Myanmar/Burma, the localization has been coordinated by InSTEDD (together with many volunteer translators). A demo can be seen at https://sahana.instedd.org - this is built as a VMWare virtual machine that can be copied to as many instances as required (if you would like to know more, please contact us). The other publicly known deployment has been by ReliefAsia.

We would like to take this opportunity to recognize the tremendous efforts of all these teams and the other members of the Sahana community, without whom none of this would have been possible. Keep up the great work, and we hope these efforts will eventually yield the best outcomes for the victims in China and Myanmar/Burma right now.

Google Summer of Code 2008

Thu, 29 May 2008 12:00:27 -0600

Sahana has 9 projects active in this year's event.
More details can be found on the Wiki

Best of luck to all the students involved!

SAHANA 0.6.2-stable released!

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 21:48:22 -0700

During this festive season, the Sahana community is proud to announce the release of Sahana 0.6.2-stable. Sahana is a disaster management system initiated after the devastating Asian Tsunami in 2004 and built around the concepts of modularized architecture and component based development. This stable release is another major and memorable achievement by the Sahana community marking the three year anniversary of Asian Tsunami.

New features include the much advanced security framework with auditing capabilities, dynamic language translation, web services, RSS facility, reporting, together with a usable AJAX enhanced interface. This release incorporates numerous bug fixes and enhancements reported by the community. Further the system has been tested to handle a load of 750 concurrent users under normal hardware configurations. Refer to the change log file along with the distribution for the full list of enhancements, known issues and load test results.

Sahana is available as a Source package (tar.gz and ZIP), Debian/Ubuntu package, RedHat/Fedora package and also as a 'Portable Apps' for MS Windows users. In order to obtain a copy of this release, please visit http://download.sahana.lk

Sahana wins FSF award for Social Benefit

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 17:20:55 -0600

On the 24th of March 2007, Sahana received its biggest award so far, the Free Software Foundation's award for Social Benefit. 4 members of the Sahana team, namely Pradeeper, Chamindra, Ravindra and Mifan, attended the awards ceremony at the annual FSF meeting, held at MIT in U.S.A, where they received the award from the founder of the FSF, Richard Stallman. The award, which is only one of two awards given by the FSF each year, was inspired by Sahana a year ago. The recipient of last year's award was Wikipedia, and Sahana follows in its footsteps this year.
It is a great honor to receive the award, and it shows the momentum and visibility the project has gained in the past few years. We would like to thank the Sahana community and everyone involved in making the Sahana project a success, that helped us achieve this honor.

FSF Press Release

IBM Donates new laptops for Sahana development

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:50:07 -0700

IBM Foundation recently donated 9 T60 Laptops to the Sahana project to replace the aging and heavily used machines the team was working with. This donation will greatly help the Sahana core team be more productive in development and testing. We would like to thank IBM for their continued support of the Sahana project and the aspirations it represents.