The Sahana Project is truly an amazing project that brought to bear the value and contribution that open source can offer. The disasterous 2004 tsunami pushed the need to the forefront and these developers in Sri Lanka came together to solve a real problem – that of tracking and managing the disaster from the point of view of the victim.

I was called upon to serve with the Singapore Civil Defence Force to help with the search and rescue at Banda Aceh, Sumatra. While the SCDF had it’s own software (nothing fancy, just a bunch of laptops running Windoze+LotusNotes), we could certainly have found value with Sahana.