Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Free Open Source Software for Red Cross Disaster Response

Greetings from Canberra, where I am attending an on-line meeting of the Sahana Software Foundation, which provides free and open source software for disaster response. We are having a presentation on the Resource Management System (RMS) which was built with Sahana's software for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). This is a modular system, used by some of the national Red Cross societies to help run their emergency response. The additional software developed as part of RMS the project is then contributed back to the open source system, for use by other organizations. The software will need to be upgraded to handle the scale of larger humanitarian organizations, such as in China. Also the software has to be able to support mobile devices and have provision for off-line use. Currently phase 3 of the project is considering which features to concentrate on and accepting input from users. There is a  job available coordinating the Resource Management System at IFRC for someone with both IT and Unitarian organization experience.

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