Sahana - disaster recovery for the people by the people

Sahana is a Free and Open Source Software suite designed for post-disaster recovery. The word "Sahana" is not an acronym. Sahana means "relief" in one of the native languages of Sri Lanka, Sinhala. Sahana is the epitome of community generated and maintained FLOSS applications. It was imagined by volunteers, built by volunteers, and is sustained completely by volunteers against private competitors who didn't see the opportunity initially, and now that Sahana is nearing maturity, cannot compete with the FLOSS development model.

The history of Sahana is one of tragedy. The first version of the application was created after the massive 2004 Asian Tsunami in Sri Lanka with an internation support team with contributors from the United States (IBM) and Swedish development grants. The purpose of the application was to provide a lightweight IT solution to the collaboration problems inherent in an internationalized post-disaster recovery setting. The application was designed to push responsibility as far into the field as possible and to decentralize control so that actors could efficiently and effectively work together with a minimum of inter-organizational red tape. When the crisis in Sri Lanka ebbed a bit, the Lanka Software Foundation lead the charge for a redesigned, more robust and fucntional Sahana.

In addition to the initial deployment and use of Sahana in the 2004 Tsunami, Sahana has been used in many other crisis situations. There have been Sahana deployments in China, the Philipines, Burma/Myanmar, Pakistan. A customization of the application exists in New York City as well.

Sahana is a truly international program and community (as graphically illustrated in some of the awkward english phrasing in the application). The code that makes up the application can be internationalized into any language in the world given the need and the availability of a group of human translators.

Even though there is corporate involvement in the application (IBM and Respere to name two) the volunteer community that has emerged around Sahana has full control over the changes that are made to the Sahana application suite.

The community, in addition to being volunteer and community driven, is also quickly responsive to improvements and additions to the software. As an example, I mentioned the above quirks in the english translation. In 3 days, across the international date line and in 8 different time zones, a team has been assembled to fix the translations for basic english while another team is being assembled to create a National Incident Management System (NIMS) compliant english version for use by public and ngo organizations in the United States.

Warning: Many posts about Sahana to come
I plan on posting early and often about Sahana. A few of the topics I plan to write about:

1. Current and intended uses
2. Unintended/unplanned uses
3. Community operations / organizational structure
   
4. Future Sahana development ideas
   
5. Reasons why the US should adopt Sahana (both Gov't and NGO's)
   
6. Steps to make the US adopt Sahana (NGO)
7. Steps to make the US adopt Sahana (Gov't)