Open Source Disaster Mgmt System

Sahana was apparently born out of the Indonesia tsunami as a free and collaborative (open source) solution:

It is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.

A concern would be whether the code is reviewed often and carefully enough to catch backdoors and other gaps. Motives and threats can be very sticky to pin down in disaster recovery, especially in destabilized nations with contentious leadership. Seems like a lot of the success of the system depends on the information reported from various sources,and so I wonder if they’ve considered using a ranking system based on validity of past reports to shore up the integrity. I noticed they mention biometrics but I can’t tell how widely it’s used — perhaps only to authenticate aid workers entering names into the database, rather than to provide signatures for reported information.

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