So it all kicked off in Myanmar this week, except that it didn’t, because the military regime has managed to bungle the response to Cyclone Nargis. We could get into a long discussion about the whys and wherefores, and there’s some frightening talk about the “right to respond” over-riding sovereignty, but let’s stay focused on [...]...
In
Media,
ngo,
blogs,
United Nations,
Burma,
Humanitarian,
Web,
Emergency Telecommunications,
GIS,
Sahana,
Remote Sensing,
Cellphone,
Logistics,
Co-ordination,
sms,
geospatial,
cyclone,
Nargis
HumaniNet participated in a successful Simulation Exercise in Nepal from 1-8 October, with participants from Caritas and ADRA (as well as a couple of UN agencies) from different countries around the region.
The UN Dispatch has an article entitled “How PDAs are Saving Lives in Africa“. It isn’t nearly as dramatic as it sounds, since it’s about how PDAs are being used to carry out health surveys, but there are some lessons for humanitarian data collection in there.
APDIP and APCICT released an e-Primer on ICT for Disaster Management, which includes Sahana as a case study. It’s an interesting overview, but doesn’t have much depth (that’s why they call it a primer, I guess).
Mifan Careem has launched the unofficial Sahana blog at TalkSahana. This is a...
Wired have just published their article on the Crisis in Darfur layers. It’s nice coverage (a little late, maybe), obviously focused on the technical aspect, but it also contains an update about Google’s involvement in this area. They’ve just announced a new nonprofit initiative called Google Earth Outreach, designed to provide more resources for these kinds of projects. There’s a showcase of a range of projects which I didn’t know about, and some nifty tutorials. The really appealling part is the Pro License Grant, which will make the full version of Google Earth more accessible to the sector, so it’s a pretty nice package overall.
However I need to make a correction, which I’ve also added to the Wired site. The article refers to me as the...
Great news from the Philippines:
The National Disaster Coordination Council (NDCC), Philippines is the highest governmental body in Philippines responsible for advising the President of Philippines on the status of disaster preparedness program and disaster relief and rehabilitation efforts at the national level.
The implementation of Sahana is part of their Disaster Management Strategy for Philippines. You can find a customization of Sahana from the homepage at http://ndcc.gov.ph down on the left navigation under the section title “VDOCSAHANA”
This is a real coup for Sahana, and could point the way to success for other country deployments such as Indonesia. Well done everybody, and hat tip to Chamindra....