Information AboutHumanitarian-foss |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT HUMANITARIAN-FOSS | |
| emergency organisations | |
|
The Humanitarian-FOSS concepts and community were inspired by the Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System which was a leading example where Free And Open Source (FOSS) software was used to help alleiviate human suffering during the December 2004 Asian Tsunami. The community was started with an informal yahoo group that was open for anyone to join. ALIGNMENT OF FOSS TO HUMANITARIAN SOFTWARE Very few countries and organizations today can afford to invest significant resources in disaster management when there is no disaster present. While this is obviously true of poor, developing nations, it is also true of richer, developed countries as well because there are always higher priority items that need the funding. Worse yet, even if there are some national scale systems that may get deployed, it is very unlikely that regional and local level systems will ever get deployed if they cost any significant amount of resources. Besides it almost seems unethical to restrict licenses to such software at a point of a humanitarian disaster, so there see very little commercial motivation to build it. This is what we see in the world today – while disaster management software is critically needed, there is no complete commercial or non-commercial software solution that is widely available. Going the open source way can address both these concerns. Using the open source development model, it is possible to develop this software at a much reduced cost compared to pure commercial development models. This is true because while commercial entities are not willing to invest into these systems, there are hundreds and thousands of well-meaning IT professionals who are very happy to donate a few hours of effort to helping build such systems. We are already seeing this with the nascent Sahana project. Thus if there was a small team which was driving such a project, then it is possible to get substantial assistance from the global IT community to make those systems truly exceptional. Additionally in large scale chaotic disasters where segregation arises between Gov and NGOs, NGOs and INGOs and worse relief groups and people and open system can bring in the required transparency for it to be trusted by all groups. Finally no two disasters or countries are the same. A good deal of customization and localization of the software is required before deployment. with Open Source anyone that is willing and able can download that code and customize it for the requirement. THE HUMANITARIAN-ICT COMMUNITY The Humanitarian ICT community consists of a global group of emergency management experts, humanitarian consultants, interested members from the NGO community and developers that strive to build applications to address the ICT needs of humanitarian problems. Currently the provide leadership on the Humanitarian-FOSS concept and the Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System . As of writing this article the members in the community amount to about 60+ people from around the world from countries such as Australia, Sri Lanka, UK, US, Germany and New Zealand. PROGRESS OF HUMANITARIAN-FOSS CONCEPT The concept is recognized by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) where such ideals are a specialization of the FSF goals to "help thy neighbour" with software. The FSF has created a new Award For Projects Of Social Benefit that was inspired by this concept and the Sahana project. WHERE TO FIND THE COMMUNITY The community predominantly operates over the Humanitarian ICT mailing list and also record all their conclusions at the Reliefsource WIKI . EXTERNAL LINKS |
|
|