Author: Nuwan Waidyanatha
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Bhutan Evaluated Sahana Eden as a replacement and enhancement for their Disaster Information System
Demonstration of Sahana tools for emergency response and crisis management to support data informed decision making
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Cleanup your CAP: towards a decentralized, immutable, and trusted alert network
Picking up from the discussion on Alerthub, back in 2016 in Bangkok, we developed a hook to update our repository whenever the WMO Register of Alerting Authorities had change; the data can be visualized on our website. The parsed data, from the Register, gave us the CAP feed URLs. Those Atom/RSS feeds were activated in…
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Sahana First Response acceptable for Seychelles
Sahna First Response (SaFiRe) prototype was designed, for simple and small Emergency Operation Centers (EOCs), with the intention of looking for potential opportunities for implementations. The wish came true when the Seychelles Department of Risk and Disaster Management (DRDM) invited a Sahana team to work on implementing a version of SaFiRe for their emergency information management needs. A…
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Inclusive Public Services for Linguistically Challenged presented @ CPRsouth2018
Smart Governments, as part of their Smart Cities programs, must include linguistically challenged in public information and services. Pictographs (pictograms or symbology) can play an important role in disaster communication. Our recommendations, presented at CPRsouth2018 in Maputo, Mozambique (208-10-05), were: NATIONAL POLICIES AND PLANS – Amend national emergency communication plans and policies to include modalities…
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“ShaRe” for bridging Social Capital during Crises
During the immediate aftermath of a disaster, it’s the neighboring communities or unaffected people in the area that activate to assist the victims with the basic needs of food, water, and shelter. However, the local community response cannot cope beyond the first 24 hours and need to reach out for external support. Often it is…
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SAMBRO would have prevented the Hawaiian human error nuke scare
An early-morning emergency alert mistakenly warning of an incoming ballistic missile attack was dispatched to cellphones across Hawaii on Saturday, setting off widespread panic in a state that was already on edge because of escalating tensions between the United States and North Korea. read the NYTimes Full Story To safeguard from such mishaps that can…
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Beyond text translations for the displaced and marginalized
Policy and Plans for Linguistically Challenged The European INTERACT project is part of a Migration Policy initiative. The project is studying how nations set emergency communication policies and plans in support multi-linguistics and crisis management. Findings are not promising and there is a severe need for intervention. Observation was that the studies had left out…
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SAMBRO Usability and Acceptability Presented at CPRSouth2017
It is coming close to an year since the Sahana Alerting and Messaging Broker (SAMBRO) was operationalized in Maldives, Myanmar, and the Philippines. A challenge was for authorities, in those three countries, to coordinate warnings across disparate communication systems and autonomous organizations. The CAP-enabled SAMBRO was designed to overcome those issues by providing a Common…
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Sri Lanka completes Pictographs fieldwork, after devastating floods
We had scheduled to carry out the Pictograph comprehensibility and appropriateness tests with Sarvodaya Communities during the last week of May, 2017. Unfortunately, the low-literate and functionally-illiterate communities, in Colombo and Ratnapura Districts, who took part in the previous exercise, were severely affected by the flash floods from the unpredicted heavy rains. Our ground partner, Sarvodaya…
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Testing our first Prototypical Pictograph Dictionary in the Philippines
We developed a prototypical pictograph dictionary and grammar around heavy rain instigated hazard events; namely ‘floods’ and ‘landslides’. This dictionary was developed from the findings gathered and analyzed from the field study in March. Sahana’s Pictographs in disaster communication project is considering two disaster communication work flows; thus, downstream “alerting” and upstream “reporting”. In alerting,…