The Sahana Software Foundation’s SahanaCamp™ NYC was held from May 22-25 in New York City at the Salvation Army of Greater New York’s Divisional Headquarters on 14th Street. SahanaCamp NYC was a free four-day program designed to provide individuals and organizations with an understanding of the needs for managing information in response to disasters paired with a practical technical workshop to provide instruction in how Sahana software can be deployed within and across organizations.  SahanaCamp NYC was attended by an enthusiastic and highly participatory audience representative of the diverse user and contributor base of the Sahana Software Foundation and identified several potential projects for local organizations to benefit from the adoption of Sahana software.  This included representatives from the United Nations, non-profit charities the Salvation Army, American Red Cross and World Cares Center; students, professors and researchers from Clark University, the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and the Center for International Earth Science Information at Columbia University, the City University of New York, independent technologists, sponsors IBM and Sahana Software Foundation contributors in town for our annual meeting.

SahanaCamp is a program of the Sahana Software Foundation’s Deployment and Training Program. The main goal of the SahanaCamp program is to quick-start deployments of Sahana software while building a local support community for local or national emergency and disaster response organizations.  From this perspective, SahanaCamp NYC was highly successful.

The SahanaCamp NYC Program

We planned a diverse program for SahanaCamp NYC in order to provide a variety of experiences for attendees to work with Sahana software from both a user and a technical perspective and to appropriately target the needs of local jurisdictions and organizations.

Day One: Sahana Software Solutions

The Sahana Software Solutions program provided a general introduction to the work of the Sahana Software Foundation and demonstrates a number of different solutions with Sahana software. The day-long program featured a disaster simulation to allow participants the experience of using Sahana software contextually, working sessions to address some of the challenges of implementing technology solutions for Emergency Management, discussions on how Sahana software might be applied by attending organizations, and breakout sessions to begin the process of requirements gathering for organizations.

Day Two: Deploying Sahana Software

This more technical program provided technology managers and technical staff from jurisdictions and organizations interested in deploying Sahana software with training as to the requirements and configurations to successfully install and deploy Sahana software within an organization. The morning session focused on the Sahana Emergency Management System distributed to local jurisdictions by the Regional Catastrophic Planning Team based on the Sahana Mayon and Sahana Kilauea products and developed by the City of New York’s Office of Emergency Management. This software is freely available for other organizations to deploy from the Sahana Software Foundation. Much of the morning program was delivered by special guest Michael Schultz, from the City of New York’s Office of Emergency Management, and who is responsible for the City’s use of Sahana software.

The afternoon focused on deployment requirements for the Sahana Eden Open Source Emergency Management Platform, which is being deployed by the International Federation of the Red Cross as well as the American Red Cross, several CERT chapters, VOAD groups and the City of Los Angeles.

The day concluded with a session on partnerships with the Sahana Software Foundation, including our unique development model and licensing policies.

Days Three and Four: Developing Solutions with Sahana Eden

SahanaCamp NYC concluded with two days of technical training in Sahana Eden. In this session we showed participants how they can develop their own solutions using the Sahana Eden. We helped participants set up their own development environment and gave participants hands on experience in how Sahana Eden can be easily customized through its Rapid Application Framework to provide functionality for: automatic CRUD form generation, mapping, SMS messaging, data import and export, and multi-language support.

Thanks to our Sponsors:

SahanaCamp NYC was made possible by the following sponsors, to whom we are extremely grateful:

Platinum Sponsors:

Gold Sponsors: