Myanmar Discussions

Colleagues,

During the NetHope Global Summit this week I had a chance to meet many of you and discuss the value of collaboration in humanitarian response. I found those conversations valuable and I learned much.

During that week the Myanmar disaster continued to unfold, with access challenges compounded by communications restrictions. A mess.

Many of you know of Sahana, an open-source tool designed for disaster response coordination by a small group of students in Sri Lanka in 2005. It has received some support over the past few years and it’s functionality has been generally well-regarded. It is open source and so problematic from a support and training perspective, but the tool itself seems to be carefully designed and has had some successful experience in a few locations.

I am on the Board of Sahana, unpaid of course, but the team in Sri Lanka has access to me easily. They contacted me earlier this week and asked if InSTEDD could host Sahana for the Myanmar response on a large pipe and fast server someplace other than in Sri Lanka and I agreed. They also asked if we could arrange for Sahana to be translated into Burmese so that local installations could be done that would last longer than the acute response and provide some cultural and logistics continuity for the local population. We agreed to that as well and that rather laborious (3500 words and phrases) localization is in progress using native speakers in the Burmese student and expat community around the world.

The Sahana installation in English is now up and running and InSTEDD will take care of it for the next few months. We can’t train Sahana, and we can’t change it, but we can make sure it runs well. It’s hosted on our blade servers at Rackspace, a huge ISP, and they guarantee six-sigma uptime.

InSTEDD is offering this software for collaboration within the humanitarian response community during the Myanmar response. It’s there if you want it. We don’t know of any other collaboration or organizational disaster management tool currently available at no cost to help across multiple agencies so we’re offering this one. Of all the responses where efficiency and optimized collaboration will count, this one, with such restrictions and such delays, may need it more than most. I hope this free software helps.

We wish each of you the very best of good fortune as you find access and comms and begin your work in Myanmar. Please tell me if there is anything further we can do to help.

You’ll find the software in the quickest place we could put it:

https://sahana.instedd.org/ and just accept the existing cert until we can get a new one issued.