The document summarizes the origins and development of Sahana, an open-source disaster management software created in response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It describes how volunteers in Sri Lanka came together to develop Sahana to help coordinate relief efforts. Over time, with contributions from volunteers around the world, Sahana expanded its capabilities and was deployed in other disaster situations. The open and collaborative nature of its development has been key to its success and potential to improve disaster response worldwide.

2. Sunflower image by Esdras Calderan:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/esdrascalderan/
Words and design by Anu Samarajiva
The Lanka Software Foundation (LSF) is a
Free and Open Source R&D non-profit with a
volunteer board from the local software industy
and university community. It has managed and
helped to fund Sahana from its inception. LSF is
also involved with other open source projects in
Sri Lanka and encourages FOSS developers with
internships and fellowships.

3. December 26, 2004.
In Indonesia, the rumble of an earthquake triggered
a wave of water that pushed out the ocean’s currents
for miles. In India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Thailand
and surrounding countries, water crashed into
land, smashing trees, buildings, and people. The
Indian Ocean tsunami was a devastating example
of how forces and materials could come together in
moments with explosive and tragic results.
However, the tsunami also generated a different kind of coming
together - one of people and ideas. In the wake of the disaster,
IT professionals and students in Sri Lanka and from around the
world joined together to develop a community-based, open
source disaster management software program. That program,
Sahana, has since spanned the globe, benefited many new
communities, accumulated several awards, and is now being
spun off as its own entity, ready to stand in the world on its
own as a powerful and creative force.

4. In telling the story of Sahana, it is important to note that
as an open source product, it owes its strength and its very
being to its community and their collective motivation
and skills. As it is, this small booklet cannot begin to do
justice to all the Sahana members’ contributions and
experiences. These contributors include the software
developers and the disaster management experts from all
over the word, as well as the many funders who dedicated
resources to this project. Also numbered among Sahana’s
stakeholders are the different governments, companies
and individuals on the user-end who have deployed the
program and further contributed to its development. A
compelling story of Sahana could be told from any one
of their perspectives, but given the constraints of this
decidely more traditional medium and its significantly
less collective authorship, this booklet focuses on a
few specific members and their perspectives. Thus, this
narrative can be read as just one particular, but in no way
privileged, thread in the collective creation that is Sahana.

5. A disaster is an emergency that a country’s organizations
and established mechanisms are unable to handle alone.
In such a situation, systems do not work – traditional
modes of communication, of hierarchy, and ways of
getting things done are simply not sufficient. Such
chaos and disorder calls for extraordinarily resilient and
productive collective action, assembled piece by piece -
the defining characteristics of open-source software.
Such an example may seem far too mundane for all the adjectives
that accompany it, and even more so for the accolades it has
received. However, in 2006, Sahana was named SourceForge’s
Project of the Month, and shortly thereafter received the Free
Software Foundation Award for Projects of Social Benefit. Most
importantly, it has gone on to become a part of the world’s
toolkit to deal with disasters. As a web based database program
to coordinate missing people, aid, volunteers, and government
camps, it brings together information and resources so that a
country can, with its established organizations and mechanisms,
quickly and efficiently bring a disaster under control.

6. Sanjiva Weerawarana, the Chairman and CEO
of WSO2 and founder of the Lanka Software
Foundation, wrote an email, long after the
initial activity and frenzy of Sahana to try to
put into order the events and people involved.
Initially, the project was the ad-hoc product
of circumstances – “various bits of software to
help manage the disaster”. Despite the scale of
disaster, with two-thirds of the coast affected,
one million homeless, and 40 thousand dead,
“the communication network was intact” and
there was space to work on software, and the
people with the knowledge to do so. Individuals,
universities and companies in Sri Lanka, as well
as international developers and organizations
like SourceForge and IBM contributed to a 24-
hour operation where the developed software
was quickly put into production about a week
after creation.

7. Mifan Careem is the CTO of Respere,
a company that helps businesses
and organizations fully utilize and
implement Sahana, and has been an
involved member in Sahana since its
inception. When he started working
with it, volunteers were already
busy working in LSF’s Colombo
University campus and University
of Moratuwa students were out in
the field collecting the data that
was to be organized and used in
Sahana. In this hectic atmosphere,
it was not always an easy flow, and
Sahana developers and government
fieldworkers often had different
views about how to get things done.

8. Louiqa Raschid, a professor at the University of
Maryland, College Park and a member of the
Sahana team since 2005, noted this problem
as well. In the world of humanitarian software,
there are people who know extremely well
how to make software work but know very little
about managing disasters, people who know
how to deal with disasters but not with the
technical fine points of software, and very few
people who know both. However, this same
incongruity between team members can be
one of the most exciting parts about working
with open source software. These programs
bring together a wide diversity of creative
independent people who are all interested
in doing innovative work. And the results are,
more often than not, just that. Innovative
in a way that traditional software is not.

9. According to Sanjiva’s timeline, “after about three months
this initial phase was completed and the software and
its deployment reached a certain level of equilibrium”.
During this lull in the storm, the state of disaster
management software as a whole came into question,
and all the actors who had frantically worked together
to put together something usable began to think about
Sahana’s long term prospects as a global product.

10. Chamindra de Silva, the first Project Management Committee
chair and a Sahana board member, who was working at the
time at Virtusa and volunteering from the very beginning
with Sahana, agreed to take on a one-year position at LSF to
take the program forward. With him as the project lead, the
foundation applied for funding from the Swedish International
Development Agency to rebuild Sahana into a comprehensive,
deployable disaster management system. In the grant cover
letter, Sanjiva wrote about this project “as an opportunity to
help the world at a time when the world is helping Sri Lanka
so willingly and widely”. When SIDA approved their funding,
Sahana Phase II, the phase of improvement and next steps,
began on August 1, 2005.

11. Part of moving Sahana forward into Phase
II was developing its capabilities as a
potential commercial product. Respere,
the company that was created by Mifan
as well as Pradeeper Darmendra, the
company’s Director, has been the main
vehicle to create a new community home
for Sahana. According to Pradeeper, who
is a Sahana board member and on the
Project Management Committee, the
Sahana application was at a certain stage
where users had begun asking for more
services. The program itself is very generic,
and its usefulness and innovation comes
from the modules that are developed to
sit on top of the main database structure.

12. Companies and organizations can choose to
adapt their workflow to meld with Sahana as it is,
simply downloaded from the Internet. Or Respere
can incorporate customized modules and adjust
Sahana to work best for the organization. They
have already done this for LIRNEasia and Sarvodaya
in Sri Lanka, and in Bangaladesh and New York
City. These pre-deployment projects get Sahana
started and working before there is any sign of
an immediate disaster. This method is in line with
the development of Sahana as global product
for disaster management, one that is well known
and already put into place preceding disaster.

13. Now, the Sahana project is in Phase III of its lifetime,
with many other phases perhaps to follow. It has
been deployed in Pakistan, China, and the Philippines,
when local governments came forward with a need
and teamed up with companies like IBM to fulfill it.
Sahana contributors like Ravindra de Silva, who has
to date contributed the most code to the project,
and emergency management expert Mark Prutsalis
took the lead in ensuring a smooth deployment. Now
the new challenge is to make Sahana into a really
robust, easily usable product, that anyone, even
some high school student somewhere, could get
started using. This goal of usability is carried out on
Sahana’s developer blogs, through Sahana’s presence
all over the Internet, and with the feedback received
from users on how it is all working for them. What is
already a user-focused program is rolling forward
as a user-friendly, well-crafted product.

14. Even as Sahana moves on to new applications
and new audiences, both commercial and
non-profit, all of its creators and users are
very aware of what this program owes to
the spirit of open-source. If Sahana was not
developed as free and open-source software
(FOSS), Sanjiva argues that it could never
have become the global force it is. It does not
have to be marketed or sold and the ongoing
innovation and dedication to its mission that
is necessary for survival comes naturally
and powerfully from the community of
developers. The Sahana project is proof that a
community built system can be of real value.

15. For Louiqa, who had never before been
involved in an open-source project, Sahana was
a learning experience. She was used to working
on a product where they started out with a good
team and clear specifications before getting to
work building the project. Open-source was the
completely opposite process, where it all started
from scratch with just the hope that people
would join in, and that if there were mistakes,
someone with expertise would come in and fix it.
It was fascinating to work with a diverse group of
people, often remotely, just trying to find a few
spare minutes in the day to work on the program,
and seeing it evolve from absolutely zero to
something really big. And that is just
what happened. That open, flowing
process was another strength
for Sahana.

16. Sahana’s creation and development marked the first
venture into the world of Humanitarian FOSS. The
establishment of the Free Software Foundation Award
was inspired by Sahana and was a recognition of the fact
that open-source software was uniquely suited to meet
humanitarian needs. And now through that award, there
is official recognition each year of other programs that
try to do the same thing. Before Sahana there were other
programs here and there that carried out parts of what
Sahana does as a whole, and now there are new programs
like a Swahili language project called Ushadi that has
set up a reporting mechanism for people to report
community news. Furthermore there is a community built
around the concept of humanitarian FOSS, founded by
Chamindra and Paul Currion, a Sahana contributor and
humanitarian information management consultant. There
is now an understanding that the ideals of community
development pursued in the developer’s world can be
extended in a very tangible way to the rest
of the world.

17. The programmers and developers who worked and
continue to work on Sahana came to it with a long
list of accomplishments and experience with other
software. However, they all spoke of Sahana as if it was
something entirely different. Mifan talked about the
developers working on the project, who as a mix of
computer and humanitarian people, were a different
sort of crowd. But they all shared a huge emotional and
sentimental stake in the project, an involvement that
grew to become yet another one of Sahana’s strengths.
Chamindra spoke of how he became involved primarily
because of the humanitarian aspect of the project. Other
developers from all over the world became involved,
wanting to help the tsunami affected countries in
the immediate moment, and to contribute to the
greater mission of humanitarian software after that.

18. Sahana is a program with lots of room for growth. Pradeeper
noted that different modules like GIS mapping features and a
function to send text message alerts are being explored and
could become a part of the system in the near future. But even
beyond these technical aspects, Sahana has demonstrated
the power and utility it has on its own as a program, and how
much potential for meaningful social change it has.
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19. As Sanjiva says of the system, it is a program that
they at Lanka Software Foundation helped to create,
it was successful, and now they are letting it go. With
this launch, Sahana becomes a separate entity from
the organization and country that helped nurture it
and coalesce the forces necessary for its growth. Now
the Sahana development community is well in place,
and ready to ensure that this product becomes a
global brand. And this attitude of creation, which is all
about nurturing and giving, is the beauty of Sahana,
of open-source, and of the community that created it.
That is certainly something to have brought into
being from the destruction and chaos of a tsunami.
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20. The Sahana community wishes to acknowledge, in
this limited format, the many significant contributions
of members of the Sahana Project Management
Committee and the Sahana Board, including the
following members:
David Bitner
Francis P. Boon
Paul Currion
Ravindra de Silva
Dominic Koenig
Ajay Kumar
Mark Prutsalis
Gavin Treadgold

21. And, to recognize that these past four years and the many more
to come would not have been possible without the support of
the following sponsors::