humanitarian.info

Professor Jeff Sonstein has contributed to discussions about Sahana in the past, and I’ve found those contributions to be very useful. His approach is very much from the user side rather than the developer side, which to be perfectly honest has been a big gap in the Sahana community. He sent around a message on the sahana-user mailing list, with a link to this page of feedback on the Sahana UI.

One of the classes I am again teaching this term here at RIT is called Website Design & Implementation… Sahana was conceived during a real emergency to meet real needs. Over time, the great work done by the initial and follow-up development teams has fleshed out the system to add needed functionality. This is a great start, but one major area needing work now that Sahana has grown so is that of the “user experience”. I wanted to comment on four (4) areas which came up in today’s in-class discussion of Sahana, all of which pertain to the “user experience” encountering Sahana.

All of these comments are worth considering – very specific to Sahana, but rooted in good practice in usability. We could use more feedback like this which can help developers to move towards a more usable version of Sahana – so if anybody out there has anything like that, then please feel free to join the community at sahana-user. It’s difficult to engage non-technical people in the Sahana effort, but this kind of feedback can be a useful contribution from anybody.

UPDATE: another good example of non-technical contributions to Sahana is the translation process, which has a home at Sahana Online Translation, thanks to the astonishing commitment of Dominic Konig – thanks Dominic!

(This post is cross-posted at TalkSahana.)

So it all kicked off in Myanmar this week, except that it didn’t, because the military regime has managed to bungle the response to Cyclone Nargis. We could get into a long discussion about the whys and wherefores, and there’s some frightening talk about the “right to respond” over-riding sovereignty, but let’s stay focused on technology. At least it’s relatively non-controversial, except that it isn’t, because Myanmar is one of those places where internet access is a non-starter, where satellite telephones are essentially illegal and where the technology infrastructure (e.g. suppliers and maintenance) is close to zero. What that means is that we’re going to be extremely limited in what we can do on the ground. So what is happening?

• A Sahana instance is being set up for the use of anybody who needs it, with the support of INSTEDD and possible uptake by NetHope members.
• Direct Relief International have done up a KMZ file of health facilities in-country, based on the WHO 2002 Global Health Atlas.
• OCHA are prepping a HIC to support the existing Myanmar Information Management Unit, who have already put out some W3 maps. UPDATE: MapAction have also deployed in support of OCHA and have maps available on their website.
• UNOSAT have also got their sat on with a KMZ file of the cyclone path and the usual satellite mapping.
• Ditto ITHACA, who have released a series of satellite maps showing the impact of Nargis.
• ReliefWeb’s info stream on Cyclone Nargis is of course like drinking water from a hose, with their map filter probably most useful.
• The WorldWideHelp blog roars into action with all the news that’s fit to blog.
• A couple of the mailing list discussions that I’m on are talking about ways in which we might leverage cellphone and/or satellite phone communications if they become available, particularly for tracking relief and relief personnel.
• Digital Globe and Geo-Eye have hopped the NASA satellite for an updating KML layer on the cyclone.
• Microsoft apparently have a team on standby to deploy the refugee tracking software that was developed for Kosovo (no reference yet). Microsoft are focused on supporting the HIC, and are ready to respond to other requests from the humanitarian community.
• Telecoms sans Frontieres are also on standby out of Bangkok, waiting for access to free up.
• Also Infoworld points out that – with regards to early warning – IT didn’t fail Myanmar, people did.

I’m nowhere near being deployed for this one (particularly as the government apparently is still refusing entry to foreign aid workers), but all of this makes me feel that we’re headed in the right direction. However until the government lets agencies start doing their jobs with less restrictions on movement and communications, we’re not going to see the benefits – another example of how the technology can be rendered much less useful when the political environment isn’t supportive. I leave you with the words of Surin Pitsuwan, Secretary-General of ASEAN in his speech last Thursday:

In spite of the technology that we have, in spite of the power that we have, in spite of the network that we have, we still lose lives needlessly… So it is more than just the power of technology, it is more than just the transformation of society through technology, it is certainly a shift in paradigm here in the minds of our people and particularly our leaders. Because if you don’t have that shift, millions and billions of dollars worth of technology cannot deliver effective, timely relief to people when they need it most, because we have reservations about opening up our borders for cooperation, because we have hesitation about cooperating with the outside world, because we have mistrust of the outside world.

• HumaniNet participated in a successful Simulation Exercise in Nepal from 1-8 October, with participants from Caritas and ADRA (as well as a couple of UN agencies) from different countries around the region.
• The UN Dispatch has an article entitled “How PDAs are Saving Lives in Africa“.  It isn’t nearly as dramatic as it sounds, since it’s about how PDAs are being used to carry out health surveys, but there are some lessons for humanitarian data collection in there.
• APDIP and APCICT released an e-Primer on ICT for Disaster Management, which includes Sahana as a case study. It’s an interesting overview, but doesn’t have much depth (that’s why they call it a primer, I guess).
• Mifan Careem has launched the unofficial Sahana blog at TalkSahana. This is a great idea, and it’s a multi-authored blog where we hope to encourage people working with Sahana to post their experiences. Any future posts on Sahana here will be cross-posted there!

Wired have just published their article on the Crisis in Darfur layers. It’s nice coverage (a little late, maybe), obviously focused on the technical aspect, but it also contains an update about Google’s involvement in this area. They’ve just announced a new nonprofit initiative called Google Earth Outreach, designed to provide more resources for these kinds of projects. There’s a showcase of a range of projects which I didn’t know about, and some nifty tutorials. The really appealling part is the Pro License Grant, which will make the full version of Google Earth more accessible to the sector, so it’s a pretty nice package overall.

However I need to make a correction, which I’ve also added to the Wired site. The article refers to me as the creator of Sahana, which I most certainly am not. However it was nice to see Sahana get linked in the article itself, so I’m not complaining too much.

Great news from the Philippines:

The National Disaster Coordination Council (NDCC), Philippines is the highest governmental body in Philippines responsible for advising the President of Philippines on the status of disaster preparedness program and disaster relief and rehabilitation efforts at the national level.

The implementation of Sahana is part of their Disaster Management Strategy for Philippines. You can find a customization of Sahana from the homepage at http://ndcc.gov.ph down on the left navigation under the section title “VDOCSAHANA”

This is a real coup for Sahana, and could point the way to success for other country deployments such as Indonesia.  Well done everybody, and hat tip to Chamindra.

Sahana keeps getting the right kind of attention in the technology world – this June, we’re the Sourceforge Project of the Month, which makes me pleased as punch.  As well as the recognition – which is great for all the developers who’ve been working on the project so far – this will hopefully attract even more developers from other locations and other projects.  Sahana rolls on….

The winners in the Stockholm Challenge 2006 were announced last week, an event which I singularly failed to attend.  Congratulations are due to RisePak, which won the Public Administration category, while Sahana received a Special Mention in the Health category.  It’s nice to see recognition for all of our efforts, although I’m not sure how much it means.  Stockholm seems very far away right now.

The Stockholm Challenge is a well established global networking program for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) entrepreneurs for over ten years. It continues to be a leader in demonstrating how information technology can improve living conditions and increase economic growth in all parts of the world. One of the main features of the Stockholm Challenge is the ICT prize, the Stockholm Challenge Award, which has attracted over 3000 projects over the years.

This year, Sahana is a finalist for the Award. They don’t have a Disasters category, so we’re in the Health category, which is a little bizarre. But it’s a great recognition of all the work that the Sahana team has put into the project over the last year.

Also nominated from the humanitarian sector are a couple of familiar names. The Fritz Institute has been nominated for their Humanitarian Logistics Software, and the guys at RisePak have also been nominated for their earthquake response work last year.

Congratulations to everybody, although I probably won’t be able to make it to the awards ceremony in Stockholm on 11 May….

Despite the terrible impact of Hurricane Katrina, it has been very positive to see the technology community using a wide range of tools to support the response. Particularly in areas such as family tracing and volunteer matching, many initiatives have been started privately, and resources such as Google Maps have really come into their own as a way of distributing information. I’m keeping a watch list of websites and articles on the use of technology in the Katrina response. You can find the (regularly updated) list on my del.icio.us roll, at del.icio.us/paulcurrion/katrina.

These initiatives are fantastic, and I’m loving the fact that so many of them are fairly spontaneous. The group that I’m involved with on the Sahana project are trying to field the prototype version, working with some volunteers in the US. I hope that we’re able to prove some concepts in this response.

However, two things occur to me:

1. Fantastic as these initiatives are, they are fragmented and unco-ordinated – much like any humanitarian response in the world, to be honest. However this is massively inefficient, and we don’t meet the needs of people and communities as quickly and appropriately as we should. Are there ways of rapidly developing network organisations to co-ordinate these initiatives, without destroying the volunteer spirit, spontaneity and inventiveness of the decentralised approach?

2. Despite the similarities in the response, this isn’t a humanitarian crisis like the ones I normally deal with. Aside from Kobe ten years ago, this is one of the few serious humanitarian emergencies that has taken place in an urbanised area in a highly-developed country. Many similar needs to an event like the Asia tsunami – housing, family tracing, victim identification, etc – but the operational environment is radically different – excellent infrastructure, functioning government, abundance of resources. At this point, it’s hard to see where to draw lessons – and easy for this event to skew funding availability and the development of useful tools for humanitarian responses in other parts of the world.