Author: Devin Balkind
-
Sahana EDEN Used for COVID-19 Responses
Sahana EDEN is an open source disaster management application enabling effective coordination and resource management, particularly in a coordinated multi-agency response. The primary use cases for Sahana EDEN have been for managing fires, floods and hurricanes, but the tool has also been extended for pandemic management with a contact tracing feature originally developed for Ebola…
-
2018 End of Year Update
Sahana Software Foundation had its Annual General Meeting (AGM) on December 5th, 2018 via a 3-hour long conference call. Approximately a dozen people participated. At the beginning of the call I, as SSF President, presented a report about last year’s activities. That report is embedded below and also accessible at this link. The report contains…
-
SSF President Explains “The Rise of Open Aid” at NVOAD Annual Conference
I had the honor of presenting “The Rise of Open Aid” at the 2018 NVOAD conference in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. The presentation offered an overview of what is increasingly known as the “open aid movement”: a collection of efforts following the open source way in disaster management and humanitarian aid contexts. The presentation describes the shared…
-
Stone Souping Social Service Information with Airtable in New York City
The Sahana Software Foundation was recently awarded a microgrant by Open Referral (using funding from Stanford’s Digital Impact program, with fiscal sponsorship from the Alliance of Information and Referral Services) to develop and deploy an open source system for managing community resource data in the popular AirTable platform and making it accessible via Open Referral’s…
-
Attend Our Free Training in New York City on Making Your Own Services Databases with AirTable
Do you manage information about health, human and social services in the nonprofit and government sectors in the New York City area? Are you interested in learning about free tools that makes it easier to organize and keep your information up-to-date? If so, you might be interested in attending our free AirTable training where you’ll learn how to use this spreadsheet-like…
-
Sahana Awarded Grant by Open Referral for AirTable-Powered Homeless Services Directories in New York City
The following proposal won a micro-grant from the Open Referral Project in December, 2017, and is now underway in New York City. Learn more at our Open Referral NYC project page. AirTable-Powered Open Referral API for Homeless Services in NYC By Devin Balkind, President, Sahana Software Foundation, devin@sahanafoundation.org AirTable is a free SaaS software solution…
-
Presenting the Open Aid Movement at Open Source Bridge
“Open source” is a method for putting intellectual property in the public domain, allowing anyone to use it however they see fit. I’m an advocate of the “open source way” because I believe that if more people shared intellectual property of all types – whether its farming techniques, software code, music, etc – then we’ll…
-
2016 End of Year Update
The SSF had its Annual General Meeting (AGM) on October 27th, 2016. It took approximately 3 hours and 10 people participated. At this meeting, I presented a report on the state of the SSF. Please look over that report and feel free to add comments directly to it. I promise to reply. The AGM confirmed…
-
Thailand BarCamp Reportback 2016
In August 2016 a number of SSF community members met in Thailand to discuss various issues related to the SSF. This gathering was funded by the SSF’s Council and the President. The people who attended were: Devin Balkind Nuwan Waidyanatha Dominic Konig Lutz Frommberger Biplov Bhandari We organized a two day “barcamp” style meeting where…
-
Sri Lanka’s Sunday Times Calls Sahana one of the “Solutions under our nose for better crisis co-ordination”
Recent floods in Sri Lanka have local media asking aloud why Sahana software, which was originally created in Sri Lanka after the 2004 Tsunami, isn’t being used by the government to help ease persistent coordination problems. Sahana Director Nuwan Wadyanatha is quotes multiple times in the article. One key quote is pasted below. “If policy-makers…