Sahana Software – Philippines Typhoon Haiyan Response


Posted on November 22, 2013  /  0 Comments

It all triggered when Dr. Alvin Marcelo, a long standing friend and fellow e-Health Researcher, sent me an email asking whether we could activate Sahana to assist them. These where his first words, “How unlucky can we be — in just a matter of weeks, we have another disaster

Since then, Sahana volunteers have put in hundreds of hours setting up the system, doing data import and cleansing, and working with contacts to prepare a system that will be of use.  We need to raise money in order to sustain these efforts and to cover the costs we have already committed for hosting and development.

Sahana fund raising campaign on Razoo
PH_Haiyan_blog
A brief update and summary on our activities to support relief operations for Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and to ask for your assistance.There are two deployments of Sahana Eden for existing stakeholder organizations and a new one that we are seeking funding to support further.
First, the Philippine Red Cross is a user of the IFRC Resource Management System – based on Sahana Eden.  They use this for managing their volunteers and resources.  There have been no requests for support or assistance directed at our community for this deployment to date.
Second, the Philippine Government Department of Social Welfare and Development use the Sahana Eden based Relief Goods Inventory & Monitoring System (RGIMS) for humanitarian logistics management.  This system is planned to be used heavily and they have requested assistance from SSF to support their operations.  We are in discussions with them to understand what resources and funding might be needed to support them, which hopefully will come from WFP, which sponsored development of the RGIMS system, or another donor.
Third, long-standing contacts with the International Open Source Network (IOSN) in the Philippines have resulted in a project to support the Philippine Department of Health and civil society groups to utilize an instance of Sahana Eden to help manage information about medical supply distributions throughout the country, yet another hugely impacting Sahana project for which we are seeking to raise funds to support.
Finally, the National Library of Medicine has stood up an event on their Sahana Vesuvius based People Locator that is syncing data with Google Person Finder.

 

Please share this information with your networks and help us raise money for the great work that we do.  We have launched a fund raising campaign on Razoo at http://www.razoo.com/story/Super-Typhoon-Haiyan-Response/ and have also posted this information to Facebook and on Twitter.  Please share this information with your networks (like, retweet, etc.) and let them know how important it is to support us.  And consider making a small contribution yourself.

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