Category: Blog
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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…
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Extending Early Warnings to Linguistically Marginalized Populations
In a work for the World Meteorological Organization, M. Golnaraghi [1] stated that “it is crucial that warning messages are clear, consistent and include risk information, designed with consideration for linking threat levels to emergency preparedness and response actions and understood by authorities and the population.” However, in its current state of practice, early warnings…
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ITU Kaleiderscope best paper awarded to SAMBRO
We presented our paper on the “intricacies of implementing the ITU-T X.1303 recommended warning standard for cross-agency situational-awareness in Myanmar, Philippines, and Maldives at ITU Kaleiderscope (2016). It is an IEEE conference sponsored by the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB). The paper was not technical in the strict sense but discussed ICT policy relevant findings that…
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Technology Stewardship, is it for the Sahana Habitat?
Last week, I was part of a Research Team that pilot tested a training course designed to build Technology Stewardship capacity in support of knowledge mobilization. The concept originates from Wenger, White, and Smith’s work on Communities of Practice, published in the Digital Habitat. From a Digital Habitat perspective the research team would be classified…
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Maldives Launches “Dhandhaana” for Early Warning
Dhandhaana in Divehi means “Reach”. This is the name the Maldives National Disaster Management Center (NDMC) has given the Sahana Alerting and Messaging Broker (SAMBRO) implementation. Now SAMBRO powers NDMC to reach the communities at risk with alerts and warnings. The implementation was the a key outcome of the “CAP on a Map” project; funded…
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Philippines Simulations Evaluation Report and Recommendations
The Philippines Atmospheric Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) has implemented the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) for Tropical Cyclone and Flood Public warnings. PAGASA has an official CAP feed that publishes the “public alerts”. The Sahana Alerting and Messaging Broker (SAMBRO) was implemented to complement and interlink the PAGASA CAP-enabled system to offer a visual…
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SAMBRO a One-Stop-Shop for the Philippine Media to get Warnings
During the Press Conference, organized by the “CAP on a Map project” in Quezon City, the Philippine Media asked the question, “how would the new system help Philippines?” The new system the they were referring to was the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) -enabled and Sahana Alerting and Messaging Broker (SAMBRO) technology. The answer was two…
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Towards a Research Design: Pictographs in Disasters
The Research Team met at Microsoft Research India, in Bangalore, to formulate a practical and appropriate research design to test the hypothesis – “pictographs, designed for the linguistically challenged, can effectively communicate disaster information for saving lives and livelihoods.” In the context of disaster communication we have identified two key communication requirements, illustrated in the…
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Teach Myanmar CAP and They will have CAP for Life
The Department of Meteorology and Hydrology (DMH) has championed in implementing and operationalizing their warning and situational-awareness platform, hosted at www.dmhwarnings.gov.mm Workshop Intro To discuss the next steps and bring closure to the CAP on a Map project, a dissemination workshop was held in Naypyitaw (02 September 2016). The workshop was held at the Hotel…
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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…