Since two people with direct experience, LIRNEasia international advisory board members Ashok Jhunjhunwala and KF Lai, were in town for the LIRNEasia@5 conference, I offered them as speakers to SLASSCOM. A well attended meeting that included local entrepreneurs such as Dinesh Saparamadu (hSenid) and Mifaan Careem (Respere) and a significant number of U of Moratuwa engineering students saw a fruitful exchange of views that has already led to the establishment of an entrepreneurs society at U of Moratuwa.

KF Lai talked about how he had been encouraged to start his own business while a government scientist, by the Government of Singapore. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, talked about how he has created a conducive environment for the incubation of start ups at IIT Madras. In the course of discussion we found that the Lanka Software Foundation had also created such an environment, albeit on a smaller scale in Sri Lanka. They both emphasized the need to have the burning desire for starting something new as an essential precondition for success.

LIRNEasia normally spends its CSR money in the disaster space. But we are happy that this little deviation is already beginning to yield results.

Four years to history, ‘Your tears are mine’ (see below) was my reaction to Asian tsunami. Reproduced in multiple sites, it was recited once in a remembrance event. Though written more in a Sri Lankan context, let me pick it again today, to remember all 225,000 lives lost, in the worst tsunami in recent history – that caused vast damage to four countries LIRNEasia closely works in, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and India.

Not my every wish was granted. The aftermath of tsunami, instead of creating a division-free society demonstrated how pathetically the disparities were amplified. Still the humanity did not collapse on December 2004. We did not let tsunami block our way.

Four years later, having completed the recovery process, most tsunami victimized societies stand on their own feet with smiles. Add to is the good news of new found disaster readiness. Not without issues (We have seen enough weaknesses during cyclone Nargis), but certainly better than what was four years ago. At least we receive false alarms. One may say, malfunctioning traffic lights are worse than not having them, but let us be positive. Now we have the technology in place in most of the cases, the question is only fine-tuning.

LIRNEasia, is glad to play its role. Disaster readiness has been one of key focus areas in our research. Our HazInfo project evaluated the suitability of five ICTs deployed in varied conditions in the last mile of a national disaster warning system for Sri Lanka and possibly by extension to other developing countries. In the current research cycle, one Mobile 2.0 @ BOP competent, looks at how Cell Broadcasting can be used in early warning. We have also joined hands with others varying from World Bank to Lanka Software Foundation (LIRNEasia assisted developing one module of Sahana – the much talked FOSS based Disaster Management system) and Telecom Authority of the Maldives to Sarvodaya, in numerous activities to make Asian societies more disaster resilient.

This explains the title. Your smiles are ours.

Your tears are mine; so are your dreams

Mothers, fathers, sisters,
brothers, sons and daughters,
Forgive us,
for burying you, unidentified,
in this unmarked grave
It’s a funeral without rites,
alas, we do not have any priests
Sans pānsukula too,
not even a piece of white cloth is left;
The sea enraged,
had swallowed all we had,
except our humanity and courage
So let us leave you here,
in the middle of this barren land,
that bears no fruits

Dear mothers and fathers,
We never asked,
whether you were Sinhalese, Tamils or Muslims
Did it bother us,
whether you were Buddhists, Christians or Hindus?
For we know,
that matters no more
Did the tsunamis care?
so why should we do?
We all know once you were humans,
as much as we all are
We also know,
once you had pleasant and ambitious dreams,
concealed in the deepest corners of your hearts,
like we all have
Don’t we know,
that you loved to be loved and to enjoy life?
Don’t we all?

Dear brothers and sisters,
Forgive us,
for these humble rites,
because that’s what we can afford right now

Dear sons and daughters,
Forgive us,
for leaving you here alone and cold,
in this unmarked grave
For we have more important tasks to do,
for you all
Can we let all of you die in vain?
Don’t we have to prove,
that you scarified your lives for a united land,
that does not differentiate humans,
by their race, creed, class or caste?
Don’t we have to prove one day that we can – and will,
fulfill your own dreams,
for a land of eternal peace,
that no tsunami can ever reduce to rubble?
Rest in peace sweet princes and princesses,
We are not going to give up that dream

Your dreams are now ours,
and the day we achieve them,
is now closer than you ever thought

Chanuka Wattegama
December 31, 2004

The day long workshop brought together sixteen Sarvodaya Community Healthcare Workers attached to the Suwadana Centers from Kurunegala District, Government Medical Officer of Health (MOH) from four MOH Divisions: Wariyapola, Kuliyapitya, Pannala, and Udubaddawa, and several other resource persons in the field of healthcare and technology to discuss the scope of the RTBP. Participants were given an overview of the present paper based national disease surveillance and notification system, concept of a holistic approach to community healthcare, the RTBP objectives and given a demo of the envisioned mobile phone application, disease surveillance database, and analytical software solutions.

The Suwadana Center Volunteers will be given mobile phones with an embedded java applet capable of recording and submitting syndrome and diagnosis information grouped by gender and age groups. The Volunteers will periodically retrieve the health data that is on paper from the healthcare providers and submit the digitized versions to a central warehouse for Experts to investigate geospatial and temporal patterns in the datasets. Upon detection of unusual patterns the central authorities will use SMS to alert the respective health authorities in the vulnerable regions.

The effectiveness of the software based analysis heavily relies on the availability of quality data. The volunteers are expected to collect the health data from hospitals, clinics, dispensaries, and other healthcare facilities in their neighborhood. Although, government protocols require that registries at these facilities maintain Bed Head Ticket (BHT) information (document containing the vital disease data), it is questionable whether this information is properly recorded and archived. Despite proper approval from the top of the chain, it is also questionable whether these facilities will cooperate in sharing the data with the project as it may seem as a burden stacked on to their workloads. Moreover, the usual practice of the Practitioners is to scrible only the patient’s diagnosis information in the BHT and prescribe treatment. The OPDs don’t necessarily maintain proper syndrome information of the patients in the OPD registries either.

At the end of the workshop the participants were given a questionnaire (Sinhala version) for the project to understand their competency and readiness embrace technology. The results of the assessment will be sharedmin the near future.

The workshop report

LIRNEasia project manager, Nuwan Waidyanatha, was 1 of 2 Sri Lankan delegates invited to present a research paper and the other was Chamindra De Silva of Lanka Software Foundation – Sahana Project. LIRNEasia presentation titled “Common Alerting Protocol Message Broker for Last-Mile Hazard Warning System in Sri Lanka: An Essential Component” was 1 of 115 papers published in the workshop proceedings. The paper was based on the research findings that proved the need for a CAP Broker to improve the performance of the Hazard-Information-Hub at Sarvodaya in order to make the Last-Mile Hazard Warning System highly reliable and relatively effective. A LIRNEasia paper on CAP relating to the “challenges of internetworking with CAP” was also published in the ISCRAM conference in Delft, Netherlands in May this year and was invited to present at the conference.

CAP is widely accepted by emergency communicators but practically adopted by very few. However lags in being used for Internetworking and Multilingual communications were it has its strengths. Those who discussed CAP including representatives from the European Union and United Sates of America expressed that the Multilingual and Physically Challenged issues are yet to be addressed in their CAP research, which means Sri Lanka may be in the forefront of CAP research.

Paper on HazInfo CAP Message Broker, ISCRAM-CHINA proceedings –
N. Waidyanatha, G. Gow, P. Anderson (2007 August). “Common Alerting Protocol Message Broker for Last-Mile Hazard Warnings in Sri Lanka: An Essential Component”. Proceedings of the 2^nd International ISCRAM Workshop, Harbin, China (B. Van de Walle, X. Li, and S. Zhang, eds.), Pages 59 – 65

Presentation – CAP Message Broker, An Essential Component

Report ISCRAM-CHINA 2007

LIRNEasia made presentations on the role of ICTs in disaster risk reduction and Early warning systems in disaster risk reduction. The discussion was lively and addressed issues of the nature of linkage with government early warning systems and the difficult problems of developing effective methods of communicating the message within the villages.

Sahana is built completely on donated funds and volunteer effort coordinated by Lanka Software Foundation. It has been officially deployed by the governments of Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. It was also part of the Strong Angel III, a test of US civil and military disaster response.

The members of the founding team that traveled from Colombo to Cambridge to accept the award were, Chamindra de Silva, project lead, as well as lead developers Pradeeper Dharmendra, Ravindra de Silva and Mifan Careem.

Every year, three finalists are nominated for the award by the free software community. This year’s other two finalists were Project Gutenberg and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC).

Full story