Wednesday, October 07, 2009

SAHANA (Sahana is a Free and Open Source Disaster Management system)

Sahana is a Free and Open Source Disaster Management system. 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.

Sahana is an integrated set of pluggable, web based disaster management applications that provide solutions to large-scale humanitarian problems in the aftermath of a disaster. Our aspirations are as follows:

  1. Primary: Help alleviate human suffering and help save lives through the efficient use of IT during a disaster
  2. Bring together a diverse set of actors from Government, Emergency Management, NGOs, INGOs, spontaneous volunteers and victims themselves in responding effectively to a disaster
  3. Empower the victims, responders, volunteer to better enable them to help themselves and others
  4. Protect victim data and reduce the opportunity for data abuse
  5. Provide a Free and Open Source solution end-to-end available to everyone

With the above aspirations, the main applications built into Sahana and problems they address so far are as follows:

  1. Missing Person Registry - Helping to reduce trauma by effectively finding missing persons
  2. Organization Registry - Coordinating and balancing the distribution of relief organizations in the affected areas and connecting relief groups allowing them to operate as one
  3. Request Management System - Registering and Tracking all incoming requests for support and relief upto fulfillment and helping donors connect to relief requirements
  4. Camp Registry - Tracking the location and numbers of victims in the various camps and temporary shelters setup all around the affected area
  5. Volunteer Management - Coordinate the contact info, skills, assignments and availability of volunteers and responders
  6. Inventory Management - Tracking the location, quantities, expiry of supplies stored for utilization in a disaster
  7. Situation Awareness - Providing a GIS overview of the situation at hand for the benefit of the decision makers

**Mencoba ikut mempopulerkan SAHANA. kapan kapan bila ada waktu akan mencoba instalasi sahana di SME Server**

Social Bookmarking

You might have heard all the buzz about the term Social Bookmarking.

What is Social Bookmarking & Why is it so powerful and different from other web promotion tactics?

Social Bookmarking websites are basically sites that categorize and store 'bookmark links' (links which take one to a specific website). Millions of visitors flood these Social Bookmarking sites to search for information.
So the idea of bookmarking is to post links back to your web page from these Social Bookmarking websites. You need to specify some keywords (we call them TAGS) which categorize your bookmark.
This allows others to search and even vote for your bookmark. Social Bookmarking is in a league of its own because of its ability to generate traffic by sharing links.

Benefits Of Social Bookmarking



More Targeted Traffic


Since your bookmarks are categorized into different TAGS, you will get very targeted traffic from people searching within a particular TAG. They will click on your bookmark link and visit your site. Your tags will rank well in the search engines due to the authority these sites have.

Faster Search Engine Indexing

Most of these Social Bookmarking sites are authoritative sites. The search engine spiders visit these sites so often that your links will be crawled almost immediately!

Higher Search Engine Ranking

Getting one-way incoming links is the main factor to higher search engine ranking. With Social Bookmarking, you can get unlimited 'keyword' links to your site. Having more keyword links that are relevant to your site will result in higher ranking.


Better PageRank

Having high PR Social Bookmarking sites linked to your site will improve your site's PR. With a higher PR, you can link to your new/existing sites and improve their ranking too! You can even monetize on it by selling links from your site!