Sahana : Case Studies (SahanaCamp 1.2)

Sahana :Case Studies

3 November 2010, Sahana Camp

Fran Boon & Michael Howden

fran@sahanafoundation.org

michael@sahanafoundation.org

Overview

• Haiti Earthquake, January 2010• Food Requests Portal• Pakistan Floods, July 2010• Veracruz Cyclone, September 2010• DRR Project Portal

Haiti, January 2010

Rapidly-changing requirements• Missing Person Registry• Mapping• Organization Registry• Hospital Management• Volunteer Registry• WFP: Food Request Portal

Missing Person Registry

• We persuaded the response community to standardize on PFIF as a tool for interoperability• Google provided a multilingual widget for

embedding into sites• US National Library of Medicine built a

Sahana front-end called iWall

PFIF

Mapping• High-resolution Satellite Imagery

available quickly (26 hrs)• OpenStreetMap volunteers used this & old

printed maps to quickly cover Port-au-Prince

• These were made available as basemaps on handheld GPS

Mapping

• Texts from people trapped under the rubble were geolocated using these maps• 1st Responders were given

coordinates for where to look & had the GPS basemaps

Organization Registry

• Army of volunteers input data from a multitude of spreadsheets– We had the best data & it was accessible

• Hospital Management– We had the best data & it was accessible– EDXL-HAVE compliant

• Volunteer Management– Built in 48 hours!

Request Management

• ‘Closing the Loop’ for data from:– SMS (4636)– Twitter (Tweak the Tweet)

• Matching Requests with Pledges• RSS feeds provided by these projects

were parsed & put into new UI

Food Requests Portal

• World Food Programme• Implementing Partners request Food

deliveries for their zones• WFP approves & schedules collection or

delivery (with armed escort, where-requested)• SMS Notifications

Pakistan Floods 2010• Largest Emergency in History of UN

• Community response effort

• Worked with Rotary Club in Pakistan

• Rapidly implemented new structured data models

• Implemented new features:• Rapid Assessment Tool

• Right to Left support

• Mapping Tools

• Inventory

Sahana Didn’t Work!

• When a disaster hits it is too late to deploy

• Lack of baseline data – locations

• No Urdu translation

• Poor SMS infrastructure

• Crowd-sourcing failed

• Inter-Organisational vs. Intra-Organisational

Veracruz, September 2010

What went well?

• Rapid setup of Infrastructure, so users could focus on usage• they took full ownership of data whilst we

focussed on Infrastructure

• Locations Hierarchy available in Wikipedia• we prioritised this before release

• Localisation into Spanish• Flexible use of Google Maps instead of

OSM

DRR Project Portal

• A website to facilitate coordination and collaboration on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) projects

• Asia Disaster Preparedness Center

• International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) Asia Partnership