OpenEvsys

Final

What is OpenEvys?

OpenEvys is a software suite in development that has been designed by the folks at HURIDOCS in collaboration with the guys at Respere.  HURIDOCS is a human rights watchdog network based in Geneva, Switzerland that works "to ensure that human rights organisations have the tools, knowledge, skills and supporting services to use their information resources effectively."  Much of HURIDOCS work is focused on helping the human rights community report abuses and interventions in some of the most dangerous areas of the world.  HURIDOCS tries to help other human rights agencies and individuals by creating the tools to do their jobs more effectively(a mission after my own heart).  OpenEvys will be a Sahana-based case working system designed to aid humanitarian agencies keep track of both human rights violations and the measures taken to intervene.

Why am I so excited about this announcement?

I have a few reasons, in no particular ranked order, why I"m excited about this new development.

OpenEvys will be Sahana based

Sahana is a free and open source disaster management tool (Sahana site here/ My blog description here) that is currently focused on post-disaster aid and recovery coordination. The Sahana community has a very organic bottom up organization that solicits contributions from all interested parties and varying levels of technical skill. It's an egalitarian organization where anyone with a good idea will have a fair shake. Additionally, the community is just that- a community. When major disasters have hit (Leyte mudslides, China earthquake, etc) the Sahana community has mobilized its volunteer base to aid in the implementation and customization of Sahana to the locality. 

So far, however, Sahana has not moved much beyond in-kind donations or "logistics" for the aid coordination.  This is not a knock on Sahana - FEMA has a juggernaught of personnnel and budget compared to that being funneled to Sahana and they're still lost. There is only so much the Sahana community can accomplish with the limited resources available at present.

Because OpenEvys will be Sahana based, the organic community, technical standards, and hopefully the volunteer base might be mobilized to support deployments of the software suite.  The main advantage for OpenEvys adopting Sahana community standards is that it will allow for easy customization of OpenEvys for post-disaster case working.

Free and Open Source Case Management Software

What do case workers do? Case workers are the advocates for individuals affected by disasters.  They help people of all incomes, races, ethnicities, religions etc... to recovery more quickly from the disasters and get back on their feet. In non-emergency situations case workers focus on helping those who fall into at-risk or vulnerable populations. Many of these people are also the most likely to be severely impacted by disasters so much of post-disater caseworking is aiding pre-existing clients with an additional set of problems created by the emergency.

Case workers are often social workers or are those with a particular humanitarian bent.  Technical knowledge is lacking in their training more often than not because of the overburned schedules and lack of funding that is sadly consistent regardless of the economic climate.  Time is money and caseworkers never get enough of either.

An additional feature of the case management universe is that there is a multitude of disparate agencies (see the alphabet soup of agencies at the bottom of the linked page for a small sample) who have case workers on staff. None of these agencies are rolling in cash.  Each would like to serve as many peple as possible while keeping within their budgets.  In order to prevent duplification of benefits, reduce individual agency overhead, and provide more consistent services, the agencies would benefit from a case management software suite that adheres to open standards and is fully customizable by each of the agencies through paid or volunteer efforts. 

While there are ongoing attempts to create this clearing house for case managemnet (See the Coordinated Assistance Network) the software is often too expensive to maintain in non-disaster situations and funding has been an issue.

OpenEvys will be the baseline case management software suite that has already found a champion in HURRIDOCS.  Agency participation is voluntary.

Technical tools for the non-technical end user

The most important development in my opinion, is that this is another attempt to engage the non-technical in the creation of their own tools.  By creating a Free and Open Source Case Management suite based on Sahana, HURIDOCS is giving the power to the social workers/case workers at the point end of the mission.  The social workers get to dictate how they want to work and what their software will enable them to do.  This revelation, this empowerment, of the end-user caseworker can only help the entire process. 

Assuming positive engagement of the case worker community, the software will make them more effective in the short term with the implementation of a community-designed software suit but also in the longer term as the implications of self-created tools empowers the end user to change their approach to how they approach their work.

Non-technical end user social workers (dirty f****ing hippies) will be able to reject off the shelf software as the mediocrity it likely is and build their own with the help of the technical community.

This future cannot come soon enough.

---

Dear Humanitarian-ICT group --

I'm Tom Longley, a project manager at Human Rights Information and
Documentation Systems, International (HURIDOCS). HURIDOCS is
Geneva-based, and has worked on information management for human
rights for 20 or so years. We've developed some useful tools to assist
human rights defenders in monitoring the situation in their country,
or globally. These include data standards, methodologies, controlled
vocabularies and database applications for documenting and analysing
human rights violations.

After a Request for Proposals process (RFP) run across this summer,
we've decided to use SAHANA as the underlying framework for
"OpenEvsys", anew open source human rights case management system.
SAHANA's features and capabilities clearly meet many of the requests
that organisations using our past applications have made of us over
the last year: clean, attractive interface, server-based, multi-user,
access control and permissioning, improved security, mapping and
charting.

Your colleagues at Respere (http://respere.com/) won the RFP with an
exiting, hugely persuasive vision of what could be achieved by
investing in, and re-using SAHANA in this way. OpenEvsys will be
released as free and open source software, and we are also pursuing
open methods in the product's development. Development is already
underway at Respere: we'll open the growing codebase up shortly on a
public repository, and gradually build up the ways in which people can
involve themselves in the project.

Amongst many things, we see OpenEvsys as:

- A generic case management system, tethered to Human Rights
standards, that meets the core needs of monitoring organisations but
is not costly to customise.
- An open place where technical people and others can contribute to
improving a system that is directly in use by human rights organisations.
- a starting point for service providers to work with in many
different local ICT markets and settings.
- A challenge to the sad habit in our sector of locking up vast public
international and donor resource in costly, duplicate, secret systems
that could easily benefit our community, and be strengthened by public
exposure.

We've put together a short briefing paper about OpenEvsys, which
describes what it will do, how it's being developed, when it will be
ready, and who will find it useful:

http://www.huridocs.org/tools/monitoring/openevsys
(grab as PDF: http://tinyurl.com/openevsysbrief ~240kb)

Happy to take any questions right here...

Regards,

Tom

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