VIVAnews - The Indonesian government has adopted an open source-based disaster management system called Sahana.
The National Body of Disaster Mitigation (BNPB) is planning to officially utilize Sahana as an information system to overcome natural disasters in Indonesia.
The disaster management system has been used earlier by various institutions, NGOs and even individuals to help disaster mitigation including during the recent West Sumatra earthquake.
Sahana is an integrated information system that was created to take on various disasters. The system enables the government to collaborate with NGOs, social organizations and volunteers to perform integrated steps.
Sahana allows disaster mapping, victims’ data collection, on-field inventory, aid catalogue creation and action coordination to be done immediately via the website.
The system was initially developed by IT practitioners (from universities and corporations) from Srilanka to handle the major Tsunami on December 26, 2004. The name, Sahana was derived from Srilankan language which means ‘helping’ or “easing” (the suffering from the disasters).
Sahana was later used by various organizations in several countries during the time of disasters such as the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, the landslides in South Leyte Philippines, the Yogyakarta earthquake in 2006, Chengdu-Shizuan earthquake in 2008 and the latest West Sumatra earthquake.
Sahana has also won various awards including the Social Benefit Award from the Free Software Foundation in 2006. At the time, Sahana beat out some of other major projects such as the One Laptop Per Child project, Project Gutenberg and even online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
When the West Sumatra earthquake hit, some institutions and organizations such as Andalas University, Air Putih Foundation, Bandung Institute of Technology and Onno W Purbo developed the system separately.
According to IT expert Onno W Purbo, the systems worked on by each institution mentioned above could be easily connected to each other. “Because they are open source-based, the systems could be synchronized to create a synergy,” Purbo said.
Sahana is not only able to establish a synchronization to overcome local disasters, but also to apply the synchronization in inter-country disasters. Shortly, Purbo said he was planning to do synchronization with the Sahana system developed in the Philippines.
Purbo also said he was contacted by people from IBM Indonesia who were assigned by the BNPB to prepare Sahana as a national disaster information management system.
According to the information acquired by VIVAnews, the system has been approved by the Head of BNPB, Syamsul Ma’arif last week and will be publicly announced next week.
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Translated by: Nataya Ermanti
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