Sahana Foundation Projects

Sahana is a free and open source Disaster Management system. It addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effec-tively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves. See Sahana web site.

Sahana software was initiated by volunteers in the Sri Lankan free & open source software (FOSS) development community to help their fellow countrymen and countrywomen affected during the 2004 Asian Tsunami in December 2004. The system was officially used by the Government of Sri Lanka and the system was released as Free and Open Source software. Subsequently a re-write as a generic disaster management tools was incubated with the sponsorship of SIDA, IBM and NSF (US) and it has be used by the dozens of Governments and NGOs since then.

The three main disaster management software products offered by Sahana include:

• Eden: A flexible humanitarian platform with a rich feature set which can be rapidly customized to adapt to existing processes and integrate with  existing systems to provide effective solutions for critical humanitarian needs management either prior to or during a crisis.
• Vesuvius: This product is focused on the disaster preparedness and response needs of the medical community, contributing to family reunification and assisting with hospital triage.
• Mayon: Currently in development with a public release planned for late in 2011. It provides an emergency personnel and resource management solution that is highly scalable to manage large numbers of events, persons and resources.