Drupal-Sahana for Disaster Management

Hi Everyone,

I've just come back from a meeting of FOSS advocates in Bangkok. The focus of the meeting was a FOSS application called Sahana, a disaster management system that has won awards from the Free Software Foundation and other bodies (it has also received a grant from Google SoC). Sahana is a humanitarian ICT effort, whose goal is to help people recover more quickly and systematically after a disaster.

It was started in Sri Lanka after the tsunami and has since been deployed in other places like the Philippines and New York City. Sahana is useful, for example, in coordinating relief efforts, making sure the goods get to the right location, and tracking these relief movements and requests. It also has a module for posting missing persons or requests to find missing persons.

What is Drupal's role in Sahana? The application is often used by NGOs and government agencies who also have their own websites. These websites usually run on FOSS CMS like Drupal, Joomla or Plone. Instead of building a CMS for Sahana and then troubling the organizations to switch to Sahana, the organizers of the Bangkok meeting wanted interoperability with the CMS. That way, NGOs who are Drupal users for example, will only have to deploy a Drupal module (or something else) to be able to link up with Sahana.

What can you do to help the effort? At this stage, we need two things. First, we need expert advice on how the "bridge" to Sahana can be constructed. This is more of a macro-level discussion. Second, we will need a core team who will actually help build the connection.

Interesting note. The core developers of Sahana told us that the architecture of Sahana was inspired by Drupal. Indeed, their website is actually built on Drupal and if you try Sahana, you will see the Drupal inspiration at work :) -- it is highly modular and uses a pluggable achitecture.

I would also like to extend an invitation to Drupal programmers in the Philippines (and in Asia in general -- since many disasters happen in this region, knock on wood) to help in the effort. We are scheduling a Drupal Meet Up in Manila, either in the last week of August or first week of September 2007. You can start by registering with our forum at GDO (http://groups.drupal.org/philippines) and/or posting here.

Maraming salamat!