Sahana: an open source Disaster Management System

In his blog, Bob Sutor talks about Sahana, an open source Disaster Management System developed by engineers from Sri Lanka.
According to the the project's web site at Sourceforge,

Sahana is a secure Web portal that provides applications for coordination and collaboration in the aftermath of disasters. Applications include finding missing people, connecting organizations, reporting on the distribution of aid and services, matching donations to requests, tracking temporary shelters, and, overall, providing transparency and visibility to groups working in a disaster. Key features include GIS, biometrics, PDA support, and availability in the form of a live CD.

Bob urges the OS community to provide some contribution to the project. What do they need? Here follows a quote extracted from the project site:

Right now we would like more help in terms of pre-deployment to other nations, working with government and NGOs to adopt Sahana and prepare for potential disaster management situations. We also would appreciate any help on documentation, localization, and of course, donations and the occasional pizza or two . You are most welcome to build or modify modules as you see fit to target a specific need. Sahana uses a pluggable architecture, so an end deployer can pick and choose only the modules that would fit the need.

Technorati tags: disaster-management, open-source.