US Military exercises with open source

Mark Prutsalis has been sending some interesting reports about the Sahana open source disaster management software being tried at Camp Roberts in California as part of RELIEF for by the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Field Experimentation Program.

Sahana was developed for relief operations in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami. After Hurricane Katrina the Sahana team discussed offering assistance. I suggested it would be unlikely the USA would have difficulty accepting external technical assistance. With Sahana as part of the Camp Roberts exercise, this is changing.

So here’s a summary of our major accomplishments:

• We were able to integrate with a local Google fusion server that was used to process imagery of the Camp Roberts area through OpenLayers. Very cool. Very bleeding edge.
• We were able to integrate with a local Open Street Maps tile server that produced data collected through Walking Papers and was available to Sahana through OpenLayers again. Again, very cool. Very bleeding edge. Do read Mikel Maron’s blog post on this.
• We were able to set up two-way integration with InSTEDD’s GeoChat application through GeoRSS feeds.
• We tested the ability of OLPCs and Netbooks to collect data in both networks and disconnected environments, connected by WIMAX and powered by a combination of solar and wind at a remote Forward Operating Base.
• We developed procedures for synchronizing and importing data collected through portable applet instances.

From: Brain dump by Mark Prutsalis on November 12th 2009