Tech Watch
Eric Rasmussen, CEO of InSTEDD, participated in our January 2008 Conference (see supporting documents and final report from the conference) detailing the expanding role electronic communications plays to facilitate the quality and timing of our disaster response dialogue. Below is InSTEDD's latest action promoting this principle.
[The following message has been RNO edited]
From: Eric Rasmussen
Sent: Friday, May 09, 2008
Subject: Sahana available for Myanmar coordination
The Myanmar disaster continue(s) to unfold, with access challenges compounded by communications restrictions
Many of you know of Sahana, an open-source tool designed for disaster response coordination by a small group of students in Sri Lanka in 2005. It has received some support over the past few years and its functionality has been generally well-regarded. It is open source and so problematic from a support and training perspective, but the tool seems to be carefully designed and has had some successful experience in a few locations.
I am on the Board of Sahana; the team in Sri Lanka contacted me and asked if InSTEDD could host Sahana for the Myanmar response on a large pipe and fast server someplace other than in Sri Lanka and I agreed. They also asked if we could arrange for Sahana to be translated into Burmese so that local installations could be done that would last longer than the acute response and provide some cultural and logistics continuity for the local population. We agreed to that as well and that rather laborious (3500 words and phrases) localization is in progress using native speakers in the Burmese student and expat community around the world.
The Sahana installation in English is now up and running and InSTEDD will take care of it for the next few months. We can't train Sahana, and we can't change it, but we can make sure it runs well. It's hosted on our blade servers at Rackspace, a huge ISP, and they guarantee six-sigma uptime.
InSTEDD is offering this software for collaboration within the humanitarian response community during the Myanmar response. It's there if you want it. We don't know of any other collaboration or organizational disaster management tool currently available at no cost to help across multiple agencies so we're offering this one. Of all the responses where efficiency and optimized collaboration will count, this one, with such restrictions and such delays, may need it more than most. I hope this free software helps.
We wish each of you the very best of good fortune as you find access and comms and begin your work in Myanmar. Please tell me if there is anything further we can do to help.
Eric
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Eric Rasmussen, MD, MDM, FACP
CEO, InSTEDD
Ed Note: Read more at Eric's blog entry.