“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 opinion was that the objectives (listed in the evaluation) were met. However, they did express that a two day camp would have been for more effective with ample time to digest and get a better feel for the Sahana-Eden framework, opposed to rushing through it in a day.
Participation:
It was a small group skewed toward a majority of them being technically quite competent. There were a few non-technical participants, in the sense they were not Python or web-technology software programers but engineers and academics with a computer science background.
Program:
The morning session gave the participants a feel for the various Sahana-Eden solutions with: community resilience mapping, vulnerability mapping, volunteer management, incident reporting, assessments, and news feeds. The exercise instructions are available here. In the afternoon, they got deep in to the code, with installing the Sahana-Eden software development package on their own laptops; then actually develop their own module, which got to being as fancy as adding a map to mark points/polygons and text-box/date controls with a localized Graphic User Interface.
Presentation slides:
Some outcomes:
The SahanaCamp ended with the lead NGO Resource Centre FOSS facilitator/Mozilla Localization Community Manager: Arky inviting us to the regular meeting of the Vietnam Disaster Management Work Group, the next day, to present Sahana and establish potential collaborations. Similarly, Rafael Saldana, Professor – Mathematics Department, Ateneo de Manila University, was keen in convincing a Filipino NGO or Civil society to adopt Sahana as well seek opportunities to hold a similar SahanaCamp in the Philippines very soon. Lutz Frommberger, Lead Researcher affiliated with the CapacityLab, belonging to the Universitat Bremen in Germany, was interested in evaluating Sahana-Eden to integrate with the Mobile4D project they are implementing in Laos.