OSS Watch team blog

The second keynote at ApacheCon US 2008 was from Shahani Markus Weerawarana, Ph.D. who said she had “witnessed the birth of a new global community rising above the depths of despair “. This keynote described what she had witnessed.

Shahani started with the often quoted  “if I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants” (Isaac Newton). In the scenario to be described the giants were identified as those people in the global open source communities. The people who work together responsibly in transparent collaboration to achieve common goals in efficient and effective ways.

The common goal that drove the people described in this keynote was to alleviate suffering. The outputs of the comunity efforts Shahani witnessd was Sahana, a free and open source disaster management system. Sahana is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems found during a disaster. These include finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers and tracking camps. Sahana is a tool to aid communication and coordination between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.

Margaret Mead once said “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful and committed people can change the world”. Sahana is a project that proves just how the open source way of doing things allows those thoughtful and committed people to truly change the world. However, there is a caveat here. We are not talking about the kind of open source that just slaps a licence on some code. We are talking about community led development of open source code, or as many call it, open development.

The Horrific Start of the Sahana Story

The Indian Ocean Tsunami struck on December 26, 2004. The first wave thundered into Sri Lanka at 8.30, a second wave hit 20 mins later. Two thirds of of the Sri Lankan coastline was affected. In Sri Lanka alone 35,000 people died, 100,000 houses were destroyed, a further 50,000 houses were considerably damaged. In total 5% of the Sri Lankan population were instantly homeless, whilst 500+ million kilos of rubble and waste was dumped on the island.

The result was destruction of unimaginable proportions spread across the whole country. Scenes of horror everywhere. For example, a train on a coastal track was stopped due to flooding in the next village.  Villagers, who were running from the first wave, found the train and climbed onto the roof in the hope of escaping the flood. The second wave hit the train. The train was smashed by the wave. Thousands died instantly.

The response from the rest of the world was amazing. We rose up to help within hours, cash started flooding into aid agencies. In the affected regions local people set up refugee camps, aid collection points and medical camps in frenzied, chaotic attempts to alleviate the suffering. Within days foreign aid workers and aid was arriving.

In Sri Lanka a small group of IT gurus stayed behind their computer screens. They suspected they could do more with their keyboards than they could with their shovels. Initial communications with organisations claiming to have disaster management systems turned up blank in terms of suitability for a disaster of this scale. The IT guru’s immediately started communicating the scale of the problem to the open source communities they were a part of. I distinctly remember the despair in those early blog reactions from people who’d seen the affects of the Tsunami first hand and the chaos that followed.

This growing band of IT specialists knew that they could build software to help coordinate the relief efforts. They set to it in the only way they knew how – they created an open development community. It is true that the majority of early work came from Sri Lanka itself, but critical support was forthcoming from other significant players around the world.

At this very early stage, only hours after the Tsunami hit, nobody knew what they needed to build, they just knew they could build something.

The Birth of Sahana

On Dec 29th Sahana (a Sri Lankan word for relief) was born. A call to the Sri Lankan prime minister, with a single question, gave the IT folk the direction they needed. The question was “what is the greatest need right now?”, an answer came immediately – “a missing persons registry,” something to help unite people separated in the evacuation efforts and to help rescue workers identify the dead.

The IT gurus got to work.

Development efforts were frantic. Contributions came in from around the world, there were more than 80 people active on the project. Work continued around the clock and the first useful release was made in about seven days. After that major releases were being made almost daily.

It was quickly realised that Sahana had mobilised enough effort to go beyond the missing person registry. People out in the field had reported that there were refugee camps that had more equipment, food and medical supplies than they needed, whilst other camps needed more supplies. As only true open development allows, individual effort was immediately directed (by the individuals themselves) to areas in which they could make the most impact. Development teams listened to the needs of the users, which were relayed by people on the ground, and simply got on with providing solutions.

Sahana Phase II

Sahana today has been completely rebuilt to provide a more maintainable architecture. Today it has an impressive list of features and continues to receive contributions from across the world. It has been deployed in China, Peru, New York, Indonesia, Philippines, Pakistan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Ohloh estimates $4.3M of effort has gone into writing the Sahana application, what Ohloh cannot do is estimate the impact it has had in disaster situations across the world.

The efforts of the Sahana team also spawned a concept and community founded by a humanitarian consultant, Paul Currion, and the Sahana project lead, Chamindra de Silva, based on the more generic ideals of Humanitarian-FOSS.

All this happened because people just wanted to help. The success of Sahana is a result of the fact that the open development model, when applied correctly,  just works. I personally believe that Sahana would not have been possible in the time frames and budgetary restrictions of the real world, if a closed model with tight management structures had been employed. Certainly, the lack of any pre-existing disaster management software would seem to support this.

What was needed was the arrival of just the right leadership and just the right motivation for those willing to help realise the vision (yes, open development is all about strong leadership).

It would appear that the Sri Lankan government also agrees that open source is the way forward. They have seen, first hand, the power of open development. Shahani reported in her keynote that the Sri Lankan government is now working hard to further benefit from the lessons learnt in the Sahana project. In particular the government is examining its procurement policies.

The people of Sri Lanka get it too. The University of Moratuwa had the highest number of successful students in the Google Summer of Code this year, pretty impressive for a country with about a third of the population of the UK. I had the honour of meeting some of these students as a GSoC administrator for The Apache Software Foundation. Let me tell you, these are impressive people.

Does it Take a Disaster?

Does it really take a disaster of the scale of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami to communicate the power of open development to the rest of the world. Certainly, hard facts don’t seem to count a great deal.

_{A video of the keynote will be available from Linux Pro Magazines archives (at the time of writing the archives were not yet available).}