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Free and Open Source Software for Crisis Management
After the tragic events that came to pass, several groups and organizations of the Sri Lankan ICT industry, including LK-LUG,have got together to create a complete disaster management system for Sri Lanka.
For the last four or five days, many have been working day and night to get this system up and running, and now it's being used by almost all the related parties including government organizations and NGOs.
The URL is at http://relief.cno.gov.lk
This project is Free Software and Open Source. Sourceforge project page is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/sahana/ . Please join the sahana-general mailing list (and later sahana-dev list when created) if you are interested in contributing. The idea is to make it generic so that any government or organization will be able to use it.
However, right now it shall address the current needs of Sri Lanka with high priority.
IBM has donated an e-series server on short term basis, until two brand new high end servers arrive. Debian is currently being used.
Some components of the system are written (and being written) in PHP/Mambo, and some others in Java, but all applications are sharing the same MySQL database.
The project will also get laptops and handhelds (including simputers running GNU/Linux), so that volunteers can take them with offline versions to remote areas and enter data. Remastered Knoppix can be a good candidate to run on laptops.
Source: Sydney Indymedia
