SahanaCamp 1.2 - Vietnam

Submitted by Michael Howden on Mon, 11/08/2010 - 00:00

On the 2nd to the 5th of November Fran Boon and I facilitated SahanaCamp 1.2 at the IBM office in Hanoi, Vietnam. This was the third SahanaCamp this year, but this time IBM were also on-board, sponsoring the event as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility engagement with Disaster Management. Before the Camp started we met with some advisors to the Government Central Committee for Flood and Storm Control (www.ccfsc.gov.vn) who were dealing with the response to severe flooding in parts of Vietnam. They shared insight into the Disaster Management landscape in Vietnam: Like in other countries I’ve been in their were a variety of different agencies with different mandates for disaster management.  The government wanted to verify all disaster related information, so questions were raised about the access controls in Sahana. Some work was already been to automate the Disaster and Needs Assessment process and we hope that there might be some future scope to integrate Sahana Eden in to the solution. As always, the emphasise was to focus on building upon and strengthening existing systems.

 
The first 2 days of the Camp were General Sessions, where we focused on the domain of disaster management and how Sahana could be used. With 20 participants from Red Cross, NGOs, UN, Government, Local Technology Companies and IBM this was the most diverse SahanaCamp so far, which made for very rich learning. We covered the definitions of Hazards, Vulnerabilities and Risk and discussed the value of Information Management. We talked about the challenges of implementing IT solutions for Disaster Management. We had a group discussion around how to overcome these challenges and were able to come up with some strategies for one of the participants who was in charge of a project to implement a Disaster Management Information System for a large International Organisation. Some of the solutions included:

  • Find people to advocate for the project.
  • Work with managers who have good relationships with their staff.
  • Distinguish between short term and long term goals and try to get some quick wins to gain support.
  •  Map out the relationships of all stakeholders.
  • Pilot systems in a few countries first.

 
To get hands on experience with Sahana Eden the participants worked in groups on 2 simulation activities.

As always this provided us with good input on opportunities to improvement Sahana, specifically around having clearer workflow.

I demonstrated the importance of having cultural contextual knowledge when I ran a “Spectogram”  energizer exercise. I asked the participants to form a  line indicating  their preference for rice or noodles. How was I to know that in Vietnam “Rice” and “Noodles” can be slang for “Wife” and “Mistress”!
 
The second 2 days focused on the technical aspects of Sahana with sessions on deployment, writing code in Sahana, editing OpenStreetMap, Localisation and Bug Reporting.
 
We wrapped up the Camp by looking at where would could move forward with Sahana in Vietnam. Pham Ngoc Van Giang from IBM discussed their hope to partner with organisation (governments?) to implement Sahana in VietNam. We all agreed to join the mailing list: http://ngocentre.org.vn/mailman/listinfo/ict4devwg in order to coordinate our activities. Lilly Nguyen a PhD student from UCLA who is doing research on Open Source  offered to do a mapping of the Disaster Management landscape in Vietnam. Truong Anh. Tuan  from iWay (iwayvietnam.com) volunteered to lead the Vietnamese translation effort and has already lead the translation of 25% of Sahana. Rakesh 'Arky' Ambati was right into the code and had already merged a number of bug fixes before the end of the Camp! We had a representative from an NGO there and it was really good to connect the energy in the room with the really world needs that Sahana Eden is trying to fill.
 
All the resources from this SahanaCamp have been shared at http://eden.sahanafoundation.org/wiki/SahanaCamp1.2. It was the best SahanaCamp so far and I’m really excited about the potential I see in Vietnam. I’m looking forward to seeing the results in the months to come.