It’s been a busy start to the year with lots going on in the Sahana.
There’s been some great voluntary contributions over the past months. Tom Baker has been making some great progress extending continuing his work developing a Sahana Mobile App. Adhitya Kamakshidasan has been tackling some tricky problems around request management and vehicle routing. We’ve also had Allen Chen and Anand Chandrasekar from North Carolina State University start to work on a project improving Sahana’s mapping. A team from Development Solutions Organization lead by Elizabeth Li is interested in helping to develop user stories, personas and scenarios and work with the Sahana Community to improve the design of our default deployment template. Finally thank you to Fran Boon from AidIQ for his tireless efforts continuing to maintain and develop Sahana, the support they give to all contributors and their reviews of code contributions to keep our code in good space!
The Google Code In program finished in January, during which high school students completed 173 small tasks to support Sahana. Congratulations to the Sahana Grand Prize Winners: Anurag Sharma and Samsruti Dash – thank you for all the contributions you made to Sahana. Thank you also to Ramindu Deshapriya and Pat Tressel who lead Sahana’s support during the program, not to mention all the other mentors.
On the governance level, there’ve been some developments. Our bylaws have been changed to open up a seat on the board to be elected by the membership at each annual meeting. We’re going through a process to develop guidelines around board roles and responsibilities to support our board to operate at full capacity.
We’ve also established an Executive Advisory Committee to engage more people to help support the Sahana Software Foundation. The initial members of this committee are Paul Currion, David Dworin and Jacqueline Parisi and their role is to provide advice on strategic issues and networking opportunities. Please get in touch with me if you’re interested in joining this committee or if there is anything you wanted their support with.
Nuwan Waidyanatha has developed a fantastic partnership between the Sahana Software Foundation, Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) to implement the CAP-on-a-Map, supporting the use of the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) in the Maldives and the Philippines. This project will be delivered by Spot-On Solutions and AidIQ.
My efforts have been focused on developing new partnerships and preparing proposals. I have had productive conversations with HDX, ACAPS, Philippines Disaster Recovery Foundation, San Francisco Neighborhood Empowerment Network, Wellington Regional Emergency Management Office, Jesuit Refugee Service, FEMA and the University of Sydney. I’ll share more as these conversations lead to collaboration with Sahana. Sahana is in the process of joining the Digital Humanitarian Network, which will hopefully create more opportunities for us. Unfortunately our application for the Rockefeller Global Resilience Partnership was not accepted, however we’re still waiting to hear back about the Knight Foundation Prototype Fund. We are also expecting work on the next phases of both the Los Angeles Community Resilience Mapping Tool and Puget Sound Maritime Common Operating Picture Project to be starting shortly.
I’ve put together a collection of brochure and presentation resources which you can check out here. Please feel free to download, share and use these!
It would be great to hear about what you’ve been up to with Sahana.
Cheers
Michael Howden
CEO, Sahana Software Foundation
michael@sahanafoundation.org
twitter:@michaelhowden