Sahana Foundation

Thank you all for having been a part of SAHANA. We wish for you and your beloved a HAPPY NEW YEAR 2020 and look forward to continue our work together, fulfilling our mission to save lives by providing information management solutions that enable organizations and communities to better prepare for and respond to disasters. #SahanaSoftwareFoundation #SAHANA #SSF

Smart Governments, as part of their Smart Cities programs, must include linguistically challenged in public information and services. Pictographs (pictograms or symbology) can play an important role in disaster communication. Our recommendations, presented at CPRsouth2018 in Maputo, Mozambique (208-10-05), were: NATIONAL POLICIES AND PLANS - Amend national emergency communication plans and policies to include modalities of disaster communication to support linguistically challenged; especially, life threatening information in alerting and incident reporting. [ 402 more words ] https://sahanafoundation.org/inclusive-public-services-for/

I had the honor of presenting The Rise of Open Aid at the 2018 NVOAD conference in Providence, Rhode Island, United States, says Devin Balkind, president of Sahana Foundation. The presentation offered an overview of what is increasingly known as the "open aid movement": a collection of efforts following the open source way in disaster management and humanitarian aid contexts. The presentation describes the shared characteristics of "open aid groups" as: [ 210 more words ] https://sahanafoundation.org/ssf-president-explains-the-ri/

The Sahana Software Foundation was recently awarded a microgrant by Open Referral (using funding from Stanford’s Digital Impact program, with fiscal sponsorship from the Alliance of Information and Referral Services) to develop and deploy an open source system for managing community resource data in the popular AirTable platform and making it accessible via Open Referral’s Human Services Data API. And we know that this labor of information maintenance could be made much more ...efficient, and this work could be made much more impactful, if such information was being managed through structured data systems that have interoperable APIs.We know that many, if not most, of the community resource directories out there in the world aren’t managed with a database at all. [ 488 more words ] https://sahanafoundation.org/stone-souping-social-service-/ See more

Do you manage information about health, human and social services in the nonprofit and government sectors in the New York City area? Are you interested in learning about free tools that makes it easier to organize and keep your information up-to-date? If so, you might be interested in attending our free AirTable training where you'll learn how to use this spreadsheet-like cloud software to better manage and share your service data and information with colleagues, clients and other organizations. [ 155 more words ] https://sahanafoundation.org/attend-our-free-training-in-n/

During the immediate aftermath of a disaster, it's the neighboring communities or unaffected people in the area that activate to assist the victims with the basic needs of food, water, and shelter. However, the local community response cannot cope beyond the first 24 hours and need to reach out for external support. Often it is the victims closer to the main roads or town who are seen and receive support; while, tucked away hidden communities are left behind. [ 499 more words ] https://sahanafoundation.org/share-for-bridging-social-cap/

The following proposal won a micro-grant from the Open Referral Project in December, 2017, and is now underway in New York City. Learn more at our Open Referral NYC project page. AirTable-Powered Open Referral API for Homeless Services in NYC By Devin Balkind, President, Sahana Software Foundation, [email protected] AirTable is a free SaaS software solution that allows people to create their own databases using a familiar spreadsheet-style interface. [ 408 more words ] https://sahanafoundation.org/sahana-awarded-grant-by-open-/

An early-morning emergency alert mistakenly warning of an incoming ballistic missile attack was dispatched to cellphones across Hawaii on Saturday, setting off widespread panic in a state that was already on edge because of escalating tensions between the United States and North Korea. read the NYTimes Full Story To safeguard from such mishaps that can be caused by a single user, in [ 111 more words ] https://sahanafoundation.org/sambro-would-have-prevented-t/

Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) Nepal is in the process of operationalizing the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) v 1.2 - enabled Sahana Alerting and Messaging Broker (SAMBRO): DHM Nepal Warning and Situational-Awareness System. I have been working closely with friends from DHM in helping to get the system up and running. DHM is expected to run some silent tests and simulations to get acquainted with the system before using it for the upcoming Monsoon season. [ 1,147 more word ] https://sahanafoundation.org/building-capacity-on-common-a/

Policy and Plans for Linguistically Challenged The European INTERACT project is part of a Migration Policy initiative. The project is studying how nations set emergency communication policies and plans in support multi-linguistics and crisis management. Findings are not promising and there is a severe need for intervention. Observation was that the studies had left out investigating the national communications plans, typically advocated by the national regulatory body (e.g. [ 523 more words ] https://sahanafoundation.org/translation-conference-uk/

Sahana Alerting and Messaging Broker (SAMBRO) has been accepted by Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) for disseminating warnings Nepal. I am setting up the system in their office and customizing it to meet their needs. SAMBRO will be hosted in the DMH main office in Kathmandu. National Emergency Operations Center (NEOC) will also be a user. [ 124 more words ] https://sahanafoundation.org/extending-sambro-for-hydromet/

When disaster strikes, volunteers are often at the heart of the response. But even before that, volunteers help communities prevent, prepare and respond to disasters, and help them to better recover afterwards. So does the Sahana Software Foundation volunteers - for which we are so very gratefull. Today, on International Volunteer Day, we celebrate the support given by those dedicated volunteers to help communities prevent, prepare and respond to crises.... #IVD2017 #SSFVolunteers #SahanaFoundation