Sahana Software Foundation

The Mission of the Sahana Software Foundation is to help alleviate human suffering by giving emergency managers, disaster response professionals and communities access to the information that they need to better prepare for and respond to disasters through the development and promotion of free and open source software and open standards.

The Sahana Software Foundation was established in 2009 as a non-profit organization to serve the needs and requirements of a diverse group of customers:

• Government agencies and jurisdictions at the national, provincial or state, and local levels
• UN Agencies, international and local charitable organizations (NGOs)
• Communities & disaster victims
• Technology companies & software developers
  

Our Vision is to build and sustain a global open and collaborative community of contributors to information and communications technologies for disaster management, in order to:

• Support the needs of Sahana customers through promoting and developing innovative open source solutions for disaster information management
• Support the adoption of open standards for data exchange between information systems to manage disaster data.
  

In order to fulfill its mission and vision, the following Objectives guide Foundation activities:

• Help alleviate human suffering and help save lives through the efficient and effective use of technology after a disaster
• Bring efficiencies to disaster response coordination through facilitating effective information sharing between disaster responders and beneficiaries
• Empower disaster victims and responders by providing them with the information they need to help themselves and others
• Build resilience and preparedness through training, education and the deployment of systems for managing disaster information in advance of a disaster.
• Provide a nurturing environment for community development of humanitarian free and open source software applications that support all four phases of emergency management
  

Please visit the Foundation wiki for more information about the Sahana Software Foundation organization, governance, board, members, licenses and projects.

The Sahana Disaster Management System Information Library has several wikis. They are defined by target audience. If you are having difficulty finding the information you are looking for, please email sahana-user@lists.sourceforge.net or visit us at http://sahanafoundation.org/chat. Several experienced Sahana volunteers will be able to assist.

The table below gives you a quick guide into the Sahana WIKI sections and how to use the WIKI.

If you like to contribute to the documentation of this WIKI, please ask for a username from any of the WIKI admins

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

Please visit the main Sahana GSOC 2010 entry page

Sahana's Haiti portal can be visited (now for historical archival purposes) at http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org

Sahana is a web-based disaster management application that provides management solutions, focusing on large-scale humanitarian disasters. It enables enhanced coordination by promoting integrated information gathering. It assists collaboration by providing a number of communication mechanisms in the aftermath of a disasters. Sahana is built from free and open source software and released under OSI licenses, which means all users are free to download and use it (and are even free to create commercial derivatives of it)...

Sahana functions both online as well as a stand alone tool for disaster management, depending on the operational considerations. Users can access it via their local machine, from within the network, as part of a corporate intranet or anywhere in world via the Internet. This means it can be installed on a laptop, for workers in the field and at a central command center for overall coordination. When machines are linked, all information can be synchronised, via USB, CD-R the LAN or the Internet...

Sahana supports all modern operating systems and browsers, including MS Windows, Mac OSX, Ubuntu and other Unix-like systems. Your browser must have JavaScript enabled and, for Agasti, your operating system must be able to run the Apache HTTP Server, the PHP programming language and MySQL database software. If running Eden then you will need to run Python. If you don't know what these are, the Installation Guides below will assist you.

Sahana's strength is also in its track record being deployed for disasters around the world. Known deployments of Sahana include those for the governments of Pakistan, Philippines, Peru, America, and Bangladesh. The full list of Sahana deployments and pre-deployments, some with case studies, highlights how a community of partners can work to deliver the Sahana solution at a time of need.

• Introductory: Sahana Brochure
• Case Studies:
  
  • ICT for Disaster Risk Reduction 2, Asian Pacific Training Centre for Information and Communications Technology for Development - 2010 (Chapter on Sahana only)
  • ICT for Disaster Risk Reduction 2, Asian Pacific Training Centre for Information and Communications Technology for Development - 2010 (includes introduction and preface)
  • UNESCAP Technical Paper - 2009
  • Communications of the ACM - 2009
  • Disaster Resource Guide Quarterly - 2008
  • Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme - 2007
  • UNDP IOSN Case Study - 2006

• Gartner Inc. Cool Vendor in Risk Management and Compliance - 2010
• Public Private Businesses Inc. Best Practices Award - 2010
• Sourceforge Community Choice Awards Best Project for Government Finalist - 2009
• Free Software Foundation Award for Social Benefit - 2006
• SHG Good Samaritan Award - 2006
• Sourceforge Project of the Month - June 2006
• User Award from Redhat Summit - 2005

The Sahana community has a friendly community to help with bugs and to receive suggestions, improvement ideas and feature requests.

1. Support by Email
   Please subscribe to the Sahana User list sahana-user@lists.sourceforge.net by clicking here.
2. IRC
   Sahana developers are available on FreeNode channel #sahana and #sahana-eden.
3. Launchpad Answers
   Visit https://answers.launchpad.net/sahana.

- Mailing List Info
Visit here.

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