Tag: Emergency Communication
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Sahana First Response acceptable for Seychelles
Sahna First Response (SaFiRe) prototype was designed, for simple and small Emergency Operation Centers (EOCs), with the intention of looking for potential opportunities for implementations. The wish came true when the Seychelles Department of Risk and Disaster Management (DRDM) invited a Sahana team to work on implementing a version of SaFiRe for their emergency information management needs. A…
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Inclusive Public Services for Linguistically Challenged presented @ CPRsouth2018
Smart Governments, as part of their Smart Cities programs, must include linguistically challenged in public information and services. Pictographs (pictograms or symbology) can play an important role in disaster communication. Our recommendations, presented at CPRsouth2018 in Maputo, Mozambique (208-10-05), were: NATIONAL POLICIES AND PLANS – Amend national emergency communication plans and policies to include modalities…
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Building capacity on Common Alerting Protocol for Nepal
Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) Nepal is in the process of operationalizing the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) v 1.2 – enabled Sahana Alerting and Messaging Broker (SAMBRO): DHM Nepal Warning and Situational-Awareness System. I have been working closely with friends from DHM in helping to get the system up and running. DHM is expected…
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Cyber-attacks and Power-failure: Disrupters of ICT use in Warning Dissemination
We have been monitoring the accessibility of the Myanmar and Maldives SAMBRO servers. Our remote server, in Singapore, pings each of the servers every 10 minutes and logs whether the server was accessible over the Internet or not. Accessibility has been extremely poor in both countries over the past 20 days. We found out that…
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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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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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SAMBRO Narrowing the Response Distance in the Maldives
Intricacies of Managing Island Emergencies Placing and maintaining emergency services in each Island, in the Maldives, can be costly for the Government. It does not make economic sense for the Government to place an air ambulatory service and a fire brigade in each Island. Some Islands have an inhabitant population of, less than, a 1000…
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Alert Hubs, a Topic at the 2016 CAP Forum Among Experts
Alert Hubs will play a significant role in receiving and sharing early warnings. It was anticipated that each Nation would require to host a National Alert Hub. Those Alert Hubs would feed into the Global Filtered Alert Hubs. Eliot Christian in his presentation said, “With so many countries implementing CAP-enabled alerting, we can see that…
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Myanmar Loving the SAMBRO Mobile APP
We conducted controlled-exercises in the Nyaungdon and Kunyangong Townships in Myanmar. The SAMBRO mobile app was exciting to the participating emergency firs-responders. The number of participants grew from 10 to 25 when they heard of the mobile app and were keen in testing the application. A significant number of the first-responders; especially in Kunyangong, did…
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Enticing Nepali Engineering Students with Sahana
Biplov Bhandari (Researcher and Sahana Developer @ AIT) and I (Nuwan) had the opportunity to present our Sahana work in Nepal. This was at the recently held 6th Mahotsav IT Festival hosted by the Gandaki College of Engineering and Science (GCES), in Pokhara, Nepal. The Honorable Minister of Information and Communications: Mr. Sherdan Rai inaugurated the…