Author: Nuwan Waidyanatha
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First LEGO League “Born2Build” team using Sahana
Born2Build is a group of enthusiastic 11year olds competing in a First LEGO League Robotics competition. The 2013 topic is “Nature’s Fury” – “children ages 9 to 16 from over 70 countries will explore the awe-inspiring storms, quakes, waves and more that we call natural disasters. Teams will discover what can be done when intense…
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SahanaCamp at the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand
The Geoinformatics Center (GIC), attached to the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) based in Thailand, invited the Sahana Software Foundation to conduct a 2 day SahanaCamp. The Sahana component of the awareness and capacity building workshop was part of a 3 week long course the Asian participants underwent at the AIT. The SahanaCamp took place…
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The Sahana Ecosystem for Disaster Mitigation presented @ITU in Hanoi
The Sahana ecosystem essentially comprise a community of practice; namely, the group of individuals sharing a common interest in investing their resources towards developing information systems for disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery phases. The power of the community of practice approach is one of the main reasons for the Philippines community was able to…
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SahanaCamp @ ISCRAM-Vietnam Rated Excellent
“Great hands-on experience of what you can do with Sahana eden … at the pre ISCRAM Vietnam conference workshop” – Julie Dugdale (VP – ISCRAM Association) – excerpt from the ISCRAM Community post on Facebook. The overall attitude of the participants towards the SahanaCamp @ ISCRAM-Vietnam was that it was an excellent opportunity and their…
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Symbols in Alerting
Often people are misconstrued by alert messages and act inappropriately because they have not fully understood the message; especially, when they are short-text messages with partial information. There are many challenges with cognition, or understanding, of public warning messages. UNESCO estimates, on average, 30% of South/West Asians and Sub-Saharan Africans to be illiterate. Those countries…
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Europe’s IES evaluates Sahana Eden CAP Broker for adoption
Recently, in Geneva, I met Massimo Cristaldi (CTO Intelligence for Environment & Security – IES – Solutions) at the CAP Implementation Workshop (23-25 April 2013). He mentioned, during a tea-break chat, that they evaluated the Sahana-Eden CAP Broker for possible adoption. Given that the Sahana-Eden CAP Broker was not fully developed, they default to building…
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GCI and GSOC complement each other, the cycle continues …
Winter of 2011-2012, the GCI students developed the blue prints for a Common Alerting Protocol-enabled Sahana-Eden Alerting broker. Taking that as a basis, the summer of 2012 GSOC student: developed the key elements for a multi-language multi-episode (i.e. multiple <info> segments for issuing a sequence of alerts for the same event) CAP broker. The CAP…
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Sahana at ITU-D in Bangkok
The International Telecommunications Union – Disaster (ITU-D) division recruited me to introduce ways in which the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) interoperable emergency communication standard could be operationalized in the Asia Pacific region. The audience comprised member state delegates from their respective telecommunications regulatory authorities and their emergency operations centres (or disaster management centres). The workshop:…
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Sahana CERT Alerting Highlighted in CAP Workshop Report
The final report that came out of the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) Policy Workshop in Montreal quoted Sahana in it. Here’s an excerpt from the report: How to notify and utilize citizen volunteers Community volunteers [e.g. Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT)] are increasingly seen as valuable resources to respond in emergencies. New tools and channels…
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“Do You Hear Me?” Sahana working to integrate voice-enable interfaces for grassroots CERT
After watching the video, please take a few minutes to complete this questionnaire (there are only three simple questions to answer). You may scroll to the bottom to access the questionnaire; else click here. Thank you in advance. With the spread of affordable telecom services, most Asians now use their own phones to stay connected.…