SSF 2011 Annual Report

Sahana Software Foundation 2011 Annual Report 1

“No innovation matters more than that which saves lives”

Avelino J. Cruz, Jr., Secretary of National Defense in the Philippines on the use of Sahana following disastrous mudslides in 2005

2 Sahana Software Foundation 2011 Annual Report


The Sahana Software Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, established in 2009 to serve the needs and requirements of a diverse group of customers:

• Government agencies and jurisdictions at the national, provincial or state, and local levels

• UN Agencies, international and local charitable organizations (NGOs) • Communities & disaster victims • Technology companies & software developers

Our Mission is to help alleviate human suffering by giving emergency managers, disaster response professionals and communities access to the information that they need to better prepare for and respond to disasters through the development and promotion of free and open source software and open standards.

Our Vision is to build and sustain a global open and collaborative community of contributors to information and communications technologies for disaster management, in order to:

• Support the needs of Sahana customers through promoting and developing innovative open source solutions for disaster information management

• Support the adoption of open standards for data exchange between information systems to manage disaster data.

HISTORY Sahana software was originally developed by members of the Sri Lankan IT community who wanted to find a way to help their country recover in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. The Sahana community has since grown to include experts in emergency and disaster management as full partners in the software development process. This is extremely unique in the governance of software projects, and a unique strength of the Sahana Software Foundation.

The Lanka Software Foundation (http://opensource.lk) was the first owner of the intellectual property making up Sahana software, and under its stewardship, Sahana software grew into a global free and open source software project supported by hundreds of volunteer contributors from dozens of countries and it supported national and local authorities and relief agencies in their response to numerous large-scale, sudden-onset disasters. In early 2009, the directors of the Lanka Software Foundation decided to allow Sahana to spin off into its own organization. The Sahana Software Foundation was established in 2009 by an initial board of directors as a non-profit organization registered in the State of California to be the ongoing caretaker of Sahana as a global humanitarian free and open source solution.


The word “Sahana” means

“relief”

or

“compassionate help”

in Sinhala,

one of the national languages of

Sri Lanka


The Sahana Software Foundation is� Board of Directors� Brent Woodworth (Chair), US Mark Prutsalis (President), US Martin Thomsen (Secretary), Denmark Louiqa Raschid (Treasurer), US David Bitner, US Chamindra de Silva, Sri Lanka Mifan Careem, Sri Lanka Darmendra Pradeeper, Sri Lanka Leslie Hawthorn, US Board Emeritus: Gavin Treadgold (2009-2011) Sanjiva Weerawarana (2009-2010) Executive Committees Board Development Brent Woodworth (Chair) Mark Prutsalis Maria D’Albert Community Development Leslie Hawthorn (Chair) David Bitner Patricia Tressel Michael Howden Darlene McCullough Development Mark Prutsalis (Chair) Louiqa Raschid Chamindra de Silva Financial Oversight Louiqa Raschid (Chair) David Bitner Paul Phillips Martin Thomsen Dale Zuehls

Members� David Bitner, US Praneeth Bodduluri, India Francis Boon, UK Ravith Botejue, Sri Lanka Don Cameron, Australia Mifan Careem, Sri Lanka Maria D’Albert*, US Trishan de Lanerolle, US Laura Lanford*, US Chamindra de Silva, Sri Lanka Ravindra de Silva, Canada Darmendra Pradeeper, Sri Lanka Sudheera Fernando, Sri Lanka Joseph Fonseka, Sri Lanka Graeme Foster*, Vietnam Leslie Hawthorn*, US Chad Heuschober, US Michael Howden, New Zealand Mahesh Kaluarachchi, Sri Lanka Avni Khatri, US Shikhar Kohli*, India Dominic König, Sweden Laura Lanford*, US Ishan Liyanage, Sri Lanka Greg Miernicki, US Glenn Pearson, US Mark Prutsalis, US Eero Pykalainen*, Malaysia Louiqa Raschid, US Eric Rasmussen, US Antonio Santos*, Portugal Martin Thomsen, Denmark Gavin Treadgold, New Zealand Patricia Tressel, US Nuwan Waidyanatha, Sri Lanka Brent Woodworth, US Tom Worthington, US Dan Zubey*, US * elected February 2012


Project Management Committees Sahana Agasti Chad Heuschober (Chair) Chamindra de Silva Darlene McCullough Greg Miernicki Glenn Pearson Mark Prutsalis Charles Wisniewski Sahana Eden Francis Boon (Chair) Praneeth Bodduluri Chamindra de Silva Graeme Foster Michael Howden Dominic König Mark Prutsalis Patricia Tressel Sahana Standards & Interoperability Chamindra de Silva (Chair) David Bitner Praneeth Bodduluri Francis Boon Mifan Careem Chad Heuschober Greg Miernicki Glenn Pearson Mark Prutsalis Louiqa Raschid Nilushan Silva Nuwan Waidyanatha

Volunteers We are grateful to the following persons for helping to fill important informal support teams and positions: Admin (Infrastructure Support) Team Praneeth Bodduluri Francis Boon Chamindra de Silva Darlene McCullough Mark Prutsalis Gavin Treadgold Patricia Tressel Dan Zubey Accounts Administrator Abhishek Arora Community Call Coordinator Michael Howden GSOC Administrators/Coordinators David Bitner Mark Prutsalis Michael Howden (2011) Laura Lanford (2012) Darlene McCullough Security Response Team Francis Boon Chamindra de Silva Greg Miernicki David Nalley Charles Wisniewski Strategic Planning Team Maria D’Albert (lead) John Bourdeaux Marin Byrne Patrick Kirk Sue Lehmann Andy Mantis Milena Markova-Brett Liliana Petrova Wiki Administrator Darlene McCullough


Message to the Sahana Community from Brent Woodworth, Chair of the Sahana Software Foundation It is my pleasure to congratulate all of you on an outstanding 2011 for the Sahana Software Foundation. Over the past year we have seen continued growth in the level of awareness and utilization of Sahana Software throughout the world. Our May 2011 annual meeting in Portugal allowed us to reaffirm our commitment and see some immediate success with the adoption of Sahana by the local volunteer fire service. Our support base in the United States continued to grow with an agreement by the City of Los Angeles to utilize Sahana Eden as the basis for their new donation and volunteer management systems. In New York City (NYC) a real-life of test of Sahana occurred when Hurricane Irene struck the East Coast and the New York City Office of Emergency Management (OEM) turned to Sahana to help manage the event. Internationally, we also experienced a major success with the adoption of Sahana by the International Federation of the Red Cross for resource management. This deployment gained the attention of the American Red Cross and drove their commitment to begin piloting the use of Sahana in their US operations. As we approach our May 2012 meeting in NYC, I am pleased to report that NYC OEM is in the process of sharing their positive Sahana experience with multiple cities throughout the northeastern United States. We are also seeing significant interest by other major US Cities and Counties along with international locations and organizations as we continue our growth path in 2012. Everyone should take a minute and reflect on this tremendous record. As a non-profit organization with very limited funding but some of the most dedicated and talented individuals in the open source and humanitarian relief community, your accomplishments are beyond compare. The systems you help to develop and implement will save many lives, accelerate recovery, improve response, and build resiliency in cities, communities, countries, and organizations throughout the world. Moving ahead, many challenges will need to be faced. Of ultimate importance is not losing focus on the reason Sahana exists – to help those in need during times of disaster. We must work together and collaborate to deliver the best possible solutions (well designed, easy to use, tested, reliable, sustainable) to situations faced by individuals, communities, governments, and organizations when preparing for, responding to, and recovering from both man-made and natural hazard events. Finally, while so many of you have done such an outstanding job this year, I want to recognize the leadership and unwavering commitment of our President and CEO. Mark Prutsalis has led us through each challenge we have faced with professionalism, optimism, encouragement, and personal commitment. The Sahana Software Foundation could never have achieved the success we now enjoy without Mark. We all owe Mark a huge debt of gratitude and should consider ourselves incredibly lucky to have him leading our organization. Best regards, Brent

Brent Woodworth, Chair


Haiti Earthquake Response Recognized The Sahana Software Foundation’s response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake was recognized by the US Department of State and the UN Foundation as uniquely effective, valuable and enduring in our innovative approach to information management after disasters. “New information and communication technologies, new information providers, and new international communities of interest emerged during the Haiti earthquake response that will forever change how humanitarian information is collected, shared, and managed. Humanitarian responders used social networking media, mobile phone text messaging, open source software applications, and commercial satellite imagery more than ever before. Outside of the established international humanitarian community, volunteers and participatory reporters from the affected population became new sources of data and information. Humanitarian organizations, host governments, and the donor community will all need to adapt to this new information environment.”

US Department of State Humanitarian Information Unit White Paper: Haiti Earthquake: Breaking New Ground

in the Humanitarian Information Landscape, July 2010

NLM’s Haiti Earthquake People Locator (Sahana Vesuvius)�

“New partners are offering faster, more effective means of analyzing an ever-increasing volume and velocity of data. The challenge ahead is how to create an effective interface between these resources, and create an eco-system where each actor understands its role. It will not be easy. Volunteer and technical communities (V&TCs) like OpenStreetMap, Sahana and CrisisMappers approach problems in ways that challenge the status quo.”

UN Foundation, Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies, 2011


Sahana Eden Haiti Hospital Registry

“What happened next is critical to lessons learned from the response. Sahana made the data available in open data formats via several feed formats, including XML, KML, GeoRSS, and the XML schema designed for tracking hospital data, EDXL -HAVE. This resource became one the best resources for health facility data for the next month. Over 8,000 unique individuals visited the site or pulled from these feeds. Crowdsourcing had taken a responsibility that would have taken OCHA days to complete and reduced it to a little more than a day of work. In the process, a group of V&TCs had built a process for locating health facilities—a process that is now being revised for the next disaster.”

UN Foundation, Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies, 2011


Sahana Projects The Sahana Software Foundation Board of Directors officially created Project Management Committees for two Sahana open source software projects in 2010� Sahana Agasti in PHP and Sahana Eden in Python.

Sahana Agasti The Agasti project seeks to create long-term “stand up” solutions, specifically, deployments that can be used for long-term planning by governments and NGOs. Two good examples of this goal are the US National Library of Medicine deployment in Washington, DC and the NYC Office of Emergency Management deployment in New York

Fun Fact: Agasti product names are all volcanoes, inspired both by the disaster management domain and

because “Agasti” means “Mountain Thrower” from Sanskrit

The current Agasti products are:

Vesuvius – Vesuvius is focused on the disaster preparedness and response needs of the medical community, contributing to family reunification and assisting with hospital triage. Development of Vesuvius is led by the US National Library of Medicine as part of the Bethesda Hospitals Emergency Preparedness Partnership to serve area hospitals, medical facilities and jurisdictions with a need to tie intake records with missing/found persons reports submitted by the public.

Mayon – Mayon provides an emergency personnel and resource management solution that is highly scalable to manage large numbers of events, persons and resources. Its intended to serve professional emergency management organizations in large municipalities and jurisdictions charged with preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation responsibilities. Mayon is being deployed by the City of New York’s Office of Emergency Management in support of its all-hazards shelter management plan and distributed to local jurisdictions through a Regional Catastrophic Planning Team branded as the Sahana Emergency Management System.

Chad Heuschober, Chair


People LocatorTM Project at the US National Library of Medicine

The US National Library of Medicine (NLM) is using Sahana Vesuvius to support disaster preparedness solutions focused on the needs for family reunification with a particular focus on the needs of hospitals, including triage, enabling capture of photos, exchange of data across facilities for use in US-hospital-focused catastrophic situations. While their primary mission has been to support the Bethesda Hospitals Emergency Preparedness Partnership (BHEPP), the NLM hosted People Locator has also supported the public use of the Vesuvius People Locator system for disaster response activities both inside and outside the United States, including the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and in 2011, earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, Japan, and Turkey, the Joplin Missouri Tornado, and Typhoon Sendong in the Philippines.


Sahana & Hurricane Irene�

Hurricane Irene was a large and destructive hurricane that impacted the Caribbean and east coast of the United States during August 2011, and making its final landfall in New York City. Irene caused an estimated $15.6 billion in damage in the United States – the sixth costliest hurricane in US history. The following article from the October 2011 issue of Catastrophic Response, the newsletter of the Regional Catastrophic Planning Team from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, describes how Sahana Mayon software was used by the City of New York’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) in their response to the Hurricane: NYC OEM sent over 1,000,000 messages to 130,000 City employees to mobilize close to 6000 staff to run the 155 different shelter and evacuation center operations during the Coastal Storm Plan (CSP) activation for Hurricane Irene. The NYC Sahana Emergency Management System is a web-based computer program that allows us to create staffing assignments using pre-identified staff and facilities. It is also used to track shelterees and staff when a disaster actually happens and shelters come online. It was built using Free and Open Source and has been adapted for NYC. NYC OEM has been working with the City University of New York (CUNY) over the past year to completely redesign and enhance the capabilities of this system. Just as we completed development of our next generation NYC Sahana, we were given the rare opportunity to test it in a live activation for Hurricane Irene. As Irene approached, City staff would need to be notified of the CSP’s activation of our sheltering system. This complex process had previously taken a month of manual labor, but Sahana reduced that to a matter of hours. To appropriately assign staff, sufficient lead-time is required in a hurricane scenario and it is at this level that we identified our greatest gaps. Once staff and shelterees began arriving, Sahana started its other mission: tracking the thousands of staff and shelterees entering the CSP shelter system. As each site came online and began entering data, they would appear in real time snapshots in the custom dashboards built for Sahana; the data received was invaluable. Lessons learned and best practices from Irene have been incorporated into the NYC Sahana application. Sahana is going to be shared with our entire RCPGP Program area and beyond for free through the new Sahana Whole product Solution project being developed. This project is taking all the software necessary to install the Sahana Emergency Management System and packaging it with comprehensive, user-friendly documentation and training describing how to install, manage, and use Sahana for events like Irene.

Catastrophic Response, Vol. 9, October 2011 http://www.regionalcatplanning.org/documents/CatastrophicResponse_Newsletter_v9.pdf


Sahana Eden Sahana Eden is a flexible humanitarian platform with a rich feature set which can be rapidly customized to adapt to existing processes and integrate with existing systems to provide effective solutions for critical humanitarian needs management either prior to or during a crisis.

Sahana Eden’s features are designed to help Disaster and Emergency Management practitioners to better mitigate, prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters more effectively and efficiently. Sahana Eden can provide valuable solutions for practitioners in Emergency Management, Humanitarian Relief and Social Development domains.

Fun Fact: Eden’s milestone releases are named after rivers in England. Previous releases have been named “Banwell”, “Crane” and “Ellen”.

The next releases will be named “Medway” and “Avon”. “Looking back, 2011 has been a huge year for the Eden project. We have seen growing usage by large organisations who are funding core capabilities - the International Federation of the Red Cross & Red Crescent Societies sponsored a Resource Management System, Project Tool & Assessment Data Analysis, the City of Los Angeles sponsored a Volunteer & Donations Management system, the Government of Nepal sponsored a Climate Change portal, and the Consortium of British Humanitarian Agencies sponsored HELIOShare to share Logistics information amongst each other. The software has been used to respond to the Chilean Wildfires & the Japan Tsunami. We have also maintained our strong volunteer base, working with the Portuguese volunteer firefighters, winning Random Hacks of Kindness in Austin with our work supporting CERT, participating actively in both Google’s student programmes: GSoC & GCI and also writing a freely-available book: the Sahana Eden Essential Guide.”

Fran Boon, Chair, Sahana Eden Project

Fran Boon, Chair


The Sahana Eden Essential Guide

The Sahana Eden Essential Guide was written for decision makers looking for an appropriate solution for disaster management, those who are deploying Sahana Eden, and those who are extending Sahana Eden for more specialized solutions or want to contribute to the project. It was written by Sahana Members Fran Boon, Dominic König, Michael Howden, Pat Tressel and Shikhar Kohli, supported by FLOSSManuals and the Google Open Source Programs Office, during the October 2011 Google Documentation Summit, held at Google’s Mountain View, California, Headquarters. The Essential Guide is a resource that makes it easier for organizations to adopt Sahana Eden software,

The Sahana Eden Essential Guide Team at the Google Doc Summit: Pat Tressel, Fran Boon, Shikhar Kohli, Dominic König, Belinda Lopez, Eli Lev and Michael Howden


“Faced with disaster situations, like those lived by our country in the last

days, the need for information becomes imperative. With this Smart Center, we can significantly reduce response times

for the persons that search, and optimize volunteer work.”

Lorenza Donoso, President of the Chilean Red Cross

on the Sahana Eden-based Smart Center solution, used in response to wildfires in early 2012

“Sahana [Eden] is blowing my mind. I can’t think of any project we’ve done

that we couldn’t build on this platform.”

@CDRP_FSU (Center for Disaster Risk Policy at Florida State University)


Sahana & the Tohoku earthquake & tsunami On March 11, 2011, northeastern Japan was struck by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, one of the largest ever to hit Japan and which triggered a powerful tsunami with waves that reached heights of up to 133 feet. The disaster killed over 15,000 persons, injured over 25,000, destroyed hundreds of thousands of buildings, and triggered a serious of nuclear accidents at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Complex that required mass evacuations. The World Bank has estimated the total economic losses from the disaster at $235 billion, making it most expensive natural disaster in history.

In response to this disaster, the Sahana Software Foundation and Sahana Eden Project supported an effort by the Hyogontech open source group based in Kobe, and IBM Japan to provide a Japanese version of Sahana Eden software for use by government and responding charitable organizations (NPOs). The site was hosted by IBM Japan’s cloud hosting services at http�//sahana.jp and included information on the location of shelters, volunteer activities, soup kitchens, and organizations.

The National Library of Medicine’s hosted Sahana Vesuvius-based People Locator was also set up to allow for searching or reporting on missing and found persons information, and was also linked to the linked Google Person Finder registry. It collected information on over 600,000 persons.


IFRC’s Resource Management System The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) developed a Resource Management System in Sahana Eden to allow their National Societies to share information on their Inventory, Assets, Staff and Volunteers. Neighboring National Societies and the IFRC can quickly see what is available in the event of a major disaster. This information is blended with data from other Geographic Information Systems (GIS), such as Population Density, Rainfall and Topography to allow for a more informed planning of the response.

The solution allows agencies to share a common server, yet retain full control over their data and who can have access to it (i.e. a multi-tenancy system). The open source nature of the software was important because it meant there was no vendor lock-in and the software was easy to maintain. For this deployment the Sahana team deployed using Amazon Web Services in the regional data center to guarantee low latency.


Sahana Standards and Interoperability Project The Sahana Standards and Interoperability Project is responsible for issues of interoperability between Sahana projects, standards compliance, and support for Open Standards both within Sahana Software Foundation projects and with external projects, such as Open Street Map or Google Person Finder. Major activities in 2011 include: Interoperability Workshop at ISCRAM The Sahana Software Foundation helped to organize and chair a workshop on systems interoperability at the 2011 Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), held in Lisbon, Portugal. The session was co-chaired by Sahana Standards Committee Chair Chamindra de Silva. Sahana was represented in Lisbon by Mark Prutsalis, Greg Miernicki and Dominic Konig, with a large support team from NLM participating remotely, during which the exchange of data between Google Persona Finder and Sahana Eden and Vesuvius was tested using the PFIF data standard.

Participants at the Interoperability Workshop at ISCRAM, May 2011 Missing Persons Community of Interest A technical working group around missing and found persons information reporting is taking a proactive approach in setting up an agreement on standards and data sharing between such major stakeholders as the ICRC and American Red Cross with technology solutions providers including Google, Facebook, and the Sahana Software Foundation through its Standards Project. The agreed framework defines the data standards upon which systems will be built, along with agreements of what information will be allowed as sharable between organizations and procedures for how to turn on and off shared data based on governance decisions and international standards for humanitarian actions, privacy concerns and local and national laws.

Chamindra de Silva, Chair


Sahana Community Development Programs The Sahana Software Foundation is dependent on the highly diversified skills of its community members who specialize in a broad range of disciplines. Our ability to attract, retain, reward, and motivate such individuals is fundamental to the long-term success of our Foundation. Sahana’s Community Development Programs serve to coordinate these efforts to foster relationships with organizations and institutions that produce new Sahana developers and active community members and serves to recruit, retain and reward Sahana Software Foundation members and other contributors. In turn, these resources give us the ability to help organizations and communities to better prepare for and respond to disasters while engaging a broad community that thinks about humanitarian issues. Google Summer of CodeTM Our role as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code (GSOC) is the highlight of our community development efforts. Sahana has been participating in this summer internship program for university students every year (since 2006). In this time, Google Summer of Code students have become core contributors as well as members of our Project Management Committees and our board of directors. Historically, over half of our almost 50 former students have stayed involved with the Sahana Software Foundation for at least one year after their internship ended, many for much longer; 8 have become members of one of our Project Management Committees; 4 have become Members of the Sahana Software Foundation; 1 serves on our Board of Directors. 10 former students have become mentors in later years for our Google Summer of Code program and at least 8 have helped mentor our Google Code-In program the past two years. This retention rate is remarkable amongst organizations that participate in the Google Summer of Code and is a testament to the value that we place on this program and the care our mentors take to provide a good experience for our students. We mentored six students in 2011. These students and their projects were:

Abubhav Aggarwal (India) Fabio Albuquerque (Brazil)

Shiv Deepak (India) Ramindu Deshapriya (Sri Lanka)

Pratyush Nigam (India) W.A. Chinthaka Rukshan Weeakkody (Sri Lanka)


Thoughts on the Sahana Google Summer of Code Program

“It’s a terrific feeling to be associated with a program as wonderful as GSoC for two consecutive years. During

GSoC 2010, I thought that like many other web applications, Sahana Eden should have its own interface

for installations and changing settings. It was great to see my idea transformed into solid, working code! I hope that

websetup will go a long way in making Eden more user friendly.”

Shikhar Kohli (2010 GSOC student, 2011 Mentor, 2012 Member)

“I am especially pleased to share that one of our student’s code was of sufficient quality and readiness that it was

successfully used during the NYC Hurricane Irene deployment and was merged into the mainline Mayon

trunk. Way to go, Fábio!” Chad Heuschober (Chair, Sahana Agasti Project, 2011 Mentor)


Random Hacks of Kindness The Sahana Software Foundation has been a participant in Random Hacks of Kindness, a series of weekend coding events organized and founded by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, NASA and the World Bank, since it began in 2009, and each RHOK event has provided an opportunity to both showcase Sahana software’s capabilities, as well as extend our broad, open source community base. The Sahana community was well represented at RHOK events in 2011, which saw 30 cities worldwide participating, and had the honor of winning first place at the RHOK 2011 Austin (Texas, USA) event.

FRAN BOON BRIEFS PARTICIPANTS AT RHOK OXFORD ON THE SAHANA EDEN SOLUTION The Sahana Eden-based solution built on an idea that began at RHOK Chicago in 2010, where members of the Chicago CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) attended the Chicago event, with a problem statement on how to better manage and unite the base of CERT volunteers. There, they met some members of the Sahana Eden community and discussed how the volunteer management module of Sahana Eden might be extended and customized to meet their requirements. RHOK 2011 provided an opportunity to continue the effort and work started in 2010. The winning Sahana Eden/CERT RHOK team included CERT representatives led by 2012 SSF Member Laura Lanford, Rich Frizelis, Linda Haynie, Jeff Nathan, and Deborah Shaddon; and a software development team led by Eden Chair Fran Boon: Kevin Doran, Dominic König, Ryan Joy, Benton Porter, Michael Pratt and Marc Tamlyn. The CERT solution has recently been adopted officially by Chicago’s CERT Chapter with a view towards it becoming a nationwide solution for CERT management needs.


Grace Hopper Celebration Open Source Day The Sahana Software Foundation has been one of the leaders in helping to organize an Open Source Day as part of the Annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. These efforts have been led by SSF Directors Louiqa Raschid and Leslie Hawthorn, SSF President Mark Prutsalis, and SSF Members Fran Boon, Avni Khatri and Pat Tressel. In 2010, the Sahana Software Foundation organized a one-day Codeathon for Humanity to provide the opportunity for attendees of the Grace Hopper Celebration the opportunity to code on Sahana software as a humanitarian open source project. The 2011 Grace Hopper Open Source Day, held on Saturday, November 12, at the Oregon Convention Center, was a significant expansion of that program. In addition to talks about open source, four other humanitarian free and open source software projects, including the Google Crisis Response Team, the Haitian Women’s Peer-to-Peer Network, Kids on Computers, and Systers provided facilitation for the second annual Codeathon for Humanity. With the guidance of experienced mentors and facilitators from these projects, Codeathon attendees wrote code together with their peers. More than a dozen attendees worked on Sahana Eden, facilitated on site by Pat Tressel and Peter Banka with remote support from a team of Eden contributors led by Fran Boon via IRC (Internet Relay Chat) during the event. Mikel Maron of the Humanitarian Open Street Map (HOT) also provided support remotely for participants who worked on Open Street Map Potlatch integration with and an OSM importer for Sahana Eden.

Google Code-In The Google Code-In is a contest for pre-university students to introduce them to all of the things that go into a successful open source project: code, documentation, outreach, quality assurance, research, training, translation and user interface. This program is a great opportunity to get students excited about contributing to a humanitarian free and open source project like Sahana, and for us to get some sorely needed tasks completed. Out of the 208 tasks that we posted for students in 2011, 193 were completed – which is an amazing effort. This program has proven successful as a community development program for both the students and for the Sahana Software Foundation. Our volunteer accounts administrator, Abhishek Arora, is a Google Code-In contestant from 2010 and one of the Grand Prize winners in 2011. Another Google Code-In contestant from 2010, Tony Young, helped mentor our program this year.


The SahanaCampTM Program SahanaCamp is a program of the Sahana Software Foundations 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. A SahanaCamp may provide attendees with:

• an understanding of how Sahana Software can help manage information before, during and after disasters�

• a practical technical workshop to provide instruction in how Sahana Software can be deployed within and across organizations�

• a forum to discuss and share best practices in the use of information tools for disaster and emergency management, which may include simulations and exercises.

A SahanaCamp is typically held over a 2- to 4-day period and provides a variety of experiences for attendees to work with Sahana software from both a user and a technical perspective. In 2011, we held the following SahanaCamps:

• SahanaCamp@ISCRAM – May 2011 – Lisbon, Portugal – held in conjunction with the 7th ISCRAM conference, SahanaCamp@ISCRAM offered participants a disaster workshop and hands-on experience with all three of Sahana Software products – Mayon, Vesuvius and Eden. The experience of attending SahanaCamp@ISCRAM has led to the nationwide adoption of Sahana Eden with the Bombeiros – the National Association of Volunteer Firefighters – in Portugal.

• SahanaCamp LA – November 2011 – Los Angeles California – organized around the adoption and deployment of Sahana software by the City of Los Angeles, SahanaCamp LA provided training to a diverse group of attendees from numerous organizations from the area and beyond, including the City of Los Angeles IT Agency, the Los Angeles Fire Department, the City of Inglewood, American Red Cross Chapters of Greater Los Angeles and Orange County� Southern California’s VOAD coordinator ENLA, IT consultants and GIS professionals, Sahana community members and a representative from the UN World Food Programme in Rome.


SahanaCamp@ISCRAM, May 2011

SahanaCamp LA, November 2011


Thank you to our 2011 Donors and Sponsors Corporate Donations

Humanitarian Organizations

Individual Contributors David Bitner Maria D’Albert Chad Heuschober Mark Prutsalis Louiqa Raschid Martin Thomsen In-Kind Donations The Sahana Software Foundation received significant in-kind contributions in 2011, which included donations of meeting space for our Annual Meeting and SahanaCamps (IBM and ISCRAM), printed materials and refreshments at these events (AidIQ and IT Crisis Services), the time to organize and deliver our SahanaCamp training program (AidIQ), the hosting of our website and wiki by the Oregon State University Open Source Labs, accounting and tax preparation services by Zuehls, Legaspi and Company, and legal advice from Aaron Rubin, from the law firm Morrison & Foerster LLP. These direct and significant contributions make the continuing operations of the Sahana Software Foundation possible.


Financial Report

2011 Income & Expense Report

2011 Income Income

Amount

Direct Public Support

Corporate and Business Contributions

Google Inc $9,500.00

AidIQ $2,479.34

Total Corporate and Business Contributions $11,979.34

Total Individual Contributions $5,765.78

Publication Royalties

Lulu Press (Eden Essential Guide) $9.59

Publication Royalties $9.59

Total Direct Public Support $17,754.71

Contracts

World Food Programme $5,016.37

Total Contracts $5,016.37

In-Kind Donations

IBM (Meeting Space, Annual Meeting) $2,539.00

AidIQ (Time & Materials, SahanaCamps) $2,173.61

IT Crisis Services (Materials & Food, SahanaCamp LA) $1,464.79

ISCRAM (Meeting Space, Annual Meeting) $608.00

Total In-Kind Donations $6,785.40

Total Income $29,556.48


2011 Expenses Expense

Amount

Business Expenses

Bank Fees

Chase $600.00

Paypal $39.24

Total Bank Fees $639.24

Business Registration Fees

Secretary of State $20.00

Total Business Registration Fees $20.00

Total Business Expenses $659.24

Contract Services

Howling Zoe Productions (website) $1,125.00

Total Contract Services $1,125.00

Operations

Hosting

Open Incident (GoDaddy) $554.69

Total Hosting $554.69

Total Operations $554.69

Events

Travel & Meetings

Annual Meeting� $11,496.18

Relief 11-02 $3,331.58

SahanaCamp LA $990.32

HFOSS Symposium $793.76

Tech@State $298.00

GSOC Doc & Mentor Summit $72.78

Total Travel & Meetings $16,982.62

Promotional Materials

T-shirts, stickers, hats $1,066.46

Total Promotional Materials $1,066.46

Total Events $18,049.08

World Food Programme Project

Hosting

Slicehost $2,112.82

Contract Services

Praneeth Bodduluri $1,500.00

Mark Prutsalis $700.00

Total World Food Programme Project $4,312.82

In-Kind Donations

Event - Annual Meeting

IBM Lisbon meeting space $2,539.00

ISCRAM meeting space $608.00

AidIQ printing costs $373.61

SahanaCamp LA Program

AidIQ time $1,800.00

IT Crisis Services materials and food $1,464.79

Total In-Kind Donations $6,785.40

Total Expense $31,486.23

Net Income -$1,929.75


Strategic Vision for 2012 and Beyond from Sahana Software Foundation President Mark Prutsalis 2011 was a great year for the Sahana Software Foundation. Sahana software has crossed a threshold between where it was a proof of concept – demonstrating a better way to manage information during disasters – into an accepted and valued part of the response toolkit of professional relief organizations. Sahana software was used during the response to such globally diverse disasters as the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Hurricane Irene in New York City and floods in Colombia. 2011 also saw Sahana Software’s formal adoption by the International Federation of the Red Cross in the Asia Pacific Region, the City of Los Angeles Emergency Management Department, and the Portuguese National Voluntary Firefighting Association – the Bombeiros – in Portugal. Our global volunteer community continued to grow in 2011 in both numbers and diversity. We welcomed 12 new Members in 2011 and early 2012, half of them women. I am extremely grateful for all that they do to support the mission and activities of the Sahana Software Foundation. Many challenges remain. The number and scale of disasters is projected to significantly increase in the coming years, and affected communities will struggle to find the resources to respond and recover while global economic austerity measures will challenge everyone searching for support for resilience and mitigation programs. Disaster Trends and Opportunities Disasters have a devastating political, economic, social, and human impact on individuals and societies. As the trends of population growth and urbanization converge, the scale and impact of disasters will continue to grow. The research is startling. When one looks at world population growth and particularly the areas where urban population growth is occurring, one will find that this growth is occurring in areas particularly vulnerable to disasters – areas prone to earthquakes and coastal flooding, even without assuming the potential impact of climate change. According to a recent UN and World Bank report, spending on disasters will triple to an estimated $185 billion per year by 2100. Major earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand, floods in Thailand and Australia, and tornadoes in the United States, made 2011 the costliest year ever for natural disasters. Recovery from major disasters such as these takes years, long after media attention has waned, public donations to charitable organizations have dried up, and information is no longer easily shared between those organizations with data, and those who need it. Disaster management is, unfortunately, a growth industry. And with that comes both an opportunity and a responsibility to do something to mitigate the risk and impacts of disasters when they do occur.

Mark Prutsalis President


Disaster Trends

• World’s urban population will reach 6.4 billion by 2050 (that’s 70% of the world’s projected population of 9.2 billion)

- United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects, 2007

• World’s population and economic centers are concentrated in “vulnerable cities near earthquake faults, on river deltas or along tropical coasts.”

- the Economist, January 14, 2012

• Growing vulnerability to an increased incidence of costly disasters § By 2050 the city populations exposed to tropical cyclones or earthquakes

will more than double, rising from 11% to 16% of the world’s population. - United Nations & World Bank, Natural Hazards, UnNatural Disasters, 2010

§ By 2070, seven of the ten greatest urban concentrations of economic assets that are exposed to coastal flooding will be in the developing world (vs. none in 2005). Assets exposed to flooding will rise from 5% of the world GDP to 9%.

- OECD, Ranking Port Cities with High Exposure and Vulnerability to Climate, 2007

• Global annual disaster spending will triple to $185 billion by 2100 - United Nations & World Bank, Natural Hazards, UnNatural Disasters, 2010

§ Spending on urban infrastructure to approach $350 trillion over next 30 years.

- Booz & Co., Reinventing the City to Combat Climate Change, 2010

§ 2011 was costliest year ever for disasters (earthquakes in Japan & Zealand, flooding in China, Australia & Thailand, tornadoes in US).

§ Five of ten costliest disasters have occurred in last five years. § 20% of aid is now spent responding to disasters; only 0.7% on mitigation. § President Obama declared record 99 disaster declarations in 2011.

- the Economist, January 14, 2012

the Economist, January 14, 2012


In early 2012, we received our 501(c)(3) certification from the US Internal Revenue Service as a non-profit organization. I feel strongly that the Sahana Software Foundation, as a global charity and purveyor of humanitarian free and open source software, can be an effective and significant part of the solution to the challenges ahead of us. Promoting Best Practices A new information environment has come about as a result of responses to major disasters like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. When the capacities of government and emergency services to respond to a disaster are exceeded and crippled, decision-makings are forced to turn to external and non-traditional sources of information in order to make life-saving decisions. New technologies have given the public tools to be reliable and trusted sources of information. Value has been found through the experiences of the Haiti and Japan earthquakes in such publicly generated information through tools capable of leveraging “crowdsourcing” and social media to identify the actionable information amidst a background of clutter. Sahana software is one such tool, but it also provides so much more in terms of capabilities to both emergency and disaster managers and the communities affected by disasters. We must be concerned with understanding and promoting best practices in leveraging these new technologies. How do you understand in 140 characters how much importance to place on a message. The challenge is to not only make sense of this efficiently, but also how to appropriately integrate publicly available information with other trusted sources and systems. Another best practice is building information systems based on open, published and widely used data standards, which makes critical systems easier to recover and rebuild. Two years after the earthquake in Haiti, there is still no national registry of hospitals and health facilities that includes capacities and services offered — critical information to planning the recovery of the public health infrastructure. The Sahana Software Foundation proposed in 2010 to build an open data repository using Sahana Eden and based on a published data standard designed to address this very issue – the Emergency Data Exchange Language - Hospital Availability Exchange standard (EDXL-HAVE) and promoted the use of this standard with other solutions providers. Unfortunately, the original Ministry of Health records were transitioned to a proprietary system that was not sustainable, and succeeding efforts have not committed to an open standard flexible enough to allow support for growth in the system by multiple agencies. We must continue to support the design of systems (both our own and others) through the work of our Standards and Interoperability project, that can easily share data using published open data standards, the type that come from organizations like OASIS, OGC, W3C, ISO, the ITU, and HL7. I want the Sahana Software Foundation to join OASIS as a member in 2012 so we can fully participate in the working technical committees that that write and maintain standards like EDXL and the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP). I’m also proud that the Sahana Software Foundation is part of a Missing Persons Community of Interest, along with Google, Facebook, the American Red Cross, ICRC, Crisis Commons, Refugees United, and others that has come together and agreed to


build interoperability into our missing and found persons systems. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, over 50 websites popped up, most hosted by well-meaning media organizations, to provide a public bulletin board for people to report themselves found or to post notes on missing or separated family members. None of these sites talked to each other; they did not collect information in a common or standard format. We must not return to those days. We can do better. That is, in part, why the Sahana Software Foundation was founded and why we continue to work hard to advocate for the adoption of open standards and best practices. Building Strong Partnerships The fact that more and more professional emergency management agencies and other humanitarian organizations are using Sahana software to help manage their own operations is an important measure of the impact of the Sahana Software Foundation. This list now includes the US National Library of Medicine, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), the City of New York Office of Emergency Management, the City of Los Angeles Emergency Management Department, the American Red Cross, CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) Chicago, the Bethesda Hospitals Emergency Preparedness Partnership, Academia Sinica (Taiwan), the Sri Lanka National Disaster Relief Services Center, the Philippine Red Cross, the Portuguese National Association of Volunteer Firefighters (Bombeiros), the Helios Foundation, the Asia Disaster Preparedness Center, and LirneAsia. We must continue to develop features in Sahana software according to user demand from these and other stakeholders in our products. This is where the strength of functionality and features in Sahana software has come from – real organizational needs. Sahana has always been a balanced partnership between software developers and emergency managers and that has made us unique, and uniquely effective. Other partnerships are equally critical for SSF to maintain and expand, including the good relationships we have with other open source organizations and technology companies like Google, IBM, AidIQ, Oregon State University Open Source Labs and others. These are not only essential for our own success and health as an organization, but also to enable us to fulfill our mission towards helping governments, humanitarian organizations, communities and people who are vulnerable to the impact of disasters. Our mission is to help others, and we do not do this alone. The Sahana Software Foundation has been incredibly successful since its inception with minimal operating funds due to the hard work and dedication of dozens of highly skilled and committed volunteers. The demands and expectations on us all are greater now, as are the stakes. With donor funding, we hope to expand our capabilities, including staffing, to be able to ensure proper maintenance and support for our codebases, provide training, and continue to further the cause of interoperability. Go forth and do good!

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