Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) was the talk of the town in Harbin at the ISCRAM-CHINA workshop, which took place August 26-27, 2007. The event was jointly organized by the ISCRAM-Community and the School of Economics and Management – Harbin Engineering University. The workshop was a post-conference meeting to the International Disaster Reduction Conference (IDRC), which took place 21-25 August, 2007. 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.
Nuwan Waidyanatha, the Project Manager of the Last-mile HazInfo Project, has been invited to speak on the findings of the project at an important regional event attended by a host of dignitaries including the Director of ITU-D, Mr Sami Al-Basheer, the seniormost official dealing with disaster issues in the UN system, Sir David Veness, and Mr Cherif Ghaly, the chair of the UN Working Group on Emergency Telecom. Draft program is here. Nuwan will speak on the lessons of the on-the-ground technology evaluations conducted by LIRNEasia and Sarvodaya in a majority of the tsunami-affected districts of the island, reported at the workshop in March. It is a significant recognition that a speaker from an organzation that has existed only for 2.5 years has been invited to a major disaster telecom event outside the Asia-Pacific region.