Sitting on the sidelines of the EM field and reading about of these seemingly wood cabinets disjoint

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There’s wood cabinets a lot of similarities between traditional disaster management organizations and volunteer technical communities such as Sahana’s – wood cabinets especially when you look at our operations from a information management perspective. We collaborate on projects with partner wood cabinets organization, wood cabinets often breaking the work down into tasks that are worked on by numerous people. For this reason we’ve been experimenting with using Sahana as the Sahana Sunflower: Community Portal to coordinate between all the contributors to our community, managing both the technical and and non-technical tasks across multiple wood cabinets projects and showcasing wood cabinets Sahana deployments around the world. Not only does this give us a valuable tool, but it’s an opportunity to Eat Our Own Dog Food – to be put in the user’s seat, to be confronted with things wood cabinets that can be improved and to make those improvements which can benefit users of all Sahana deployments.
Sunflower is an ongoing development. Hitesh Sharma has been working on this throughout his internship with Sahana and I hope that we will have someone working on it during the 2015 Google Summer wood cabinets of Code Program. Here are the full Blue Prints for what is planned. Get in touch if you’re keen to contribute.
Sahana isn’t the only volunteer technical community community needed a coordination platform . I’ve recently had conversations with Helen Campbell wood cabinets and Roxanne Moore from the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) . They’ve been doing great work leveraging digital networks for humanitarian response. To support their work they’ve developed a number of spreadsheet based tool, which track partner organizations, contacts, events, tasking, wood cabinets data sources and needs. wood cabinets
There’s lot of good things about spreadsheets: they’re easy to use, they’re flexible, they’re easy to change and can evolve very organically, they model very closely to a physical representation of data (a table on a piece of paper). But they have their limitations too: at a certain point they get too big to easily use (try printing a 30 column spreadsheet on one page!), they don’t show all the relationships between data, making reports/visualizations/maps can be tricky, they don’t support information management over workflows.
Helen and Roxanne both recognize the opportunity to implement a better solution and DHN are still going through their discovery process for this. I think it would be great for them to use Sahana to as their coordination wood cabinets platform. It would give DHN a better wood cabinets (open source) tool to manage their information and support workflows. wood cabinets It would help to have a bunch more tech-saavy people using the Sahana platform, suggesting improvements, piloting wood cabinets new features and maybe even becoming wood cabinets contributors. But most importantly it would mean that when a disaster management organization comes along needing a platform to manage their own operations, we have a mature, usable, open source solution that we’re all familiar with using to recommend: Sahana.
Sitting on the sidelines of the EM field and reading about of these seemingly wood cabinets disjointed efforts to enable volunteer communities I get the impression that people wood cabinets are seeking some magic bullet to solve the disaster response management issue.
Should I go with this one? Or should I go with that one because they have more social marketing pull to it? I know that it is all about needs and satisfying some business-type justification to better decision making in response to an emergency, but,… I do not get the feel that all players in VTC or VOST or whatever other acronym want to come out and state: “Hey! We should put all of our joint (and somewhat scarce) resources into these projects X, Y, and Z, and now focus on the people in need”
I believe that Sahana’s work and successes are not fully respected by enough of the supposed thought leaders in disaster management. Why? I can only speculate, and I think that some of the lack of respect comes from the reality that there is prejudice in Western societies to grass-roots development for today’s problems that originate in developing countries. How long has M-Pesa been around? Yet, now that Bill Gates has “discovered” it(similar to Columbus discovering Americas!) and has written about it, mobile banking is “it”.
> are we not pitting one platform wood cabinets against another and letting one s own vanity wood cabinets get in the way of helping those in real need? There is a risk of this. Huge investments of volunteer effort create biase – so it’s important to be able to step back and see the bigger picture.
> Should I go with this one? Or should I go with that one because t