"Sahana" is "FOSS" ("free Open Source software"), but that isn't important.
It's a Disaster Management System.
Some of the features:
Sahana is a collection of web based disaster management applications that provides solutions to large-scale humanitarian coordination and collaboration in disaster situation and its aftermath. Sahana consists of several modules for following functionalities:
Situation Mapping - Allows you to locate activities on a map providing current situation awareness.
Missing Person Registry - Helps to report and search missing person.
Disaster Victim Registry - Traces internally displaced people (IDPs) and their needs.
Organization Registry - Lists 'who is doing what & where'. Allows relief agencies to self organize the activities rendering fine coordination among them.
Request/Aid Management - Tracks requests for aid and matches them against donars who have pledged aid.
Shelter Registry - Tracks the location, distibution, capacity and breakdown of victims in shelter.
Inventory Management - Effectively and efficiently manage relief aid, enables transfer of inventory items to different inventories and notify when items are required to refill.
Messaging Module - Allows communication by email and SMS text messaging to groups.
Volunteer Management - Allows managing volunteers by capturing their skills, availability and allocation.
Aid Catalog - Captures information on different catalogues and measurement units. These information are being used in systems such as Inventory Management System and Request Management System.
Reporting System - Allows system to generate reports based on sahana database. It aggregates all the module reports in one place for making easier the user to view, search reports and charts.
Synchronization - Allows data exchange between instances of Sahana by synchronization.
User Preferences - Allows you to set any preferred configuration. Which will help you to customize Sahana to your preference.
Administration - Allows you to configure and customize Sahana based on your requirements.
Now, I did not write this. I had nothing to do with authoring this.
However, because I actually know what the fuck I am doing, due to 15 years of Linux administration and development, this took me about one hour to install onto my base server, which also serves the Aspen Hill Network Wiki among other things.
That base server took me a while to set up, but look at it as follows.
A while back, the County sent me a form of the type that they send to everyone on their list of potential contractors. More or less it was a request to bid, except that it was not an official request to bid.
They wanted a system with about a quarter of the capabilities of this system. Mostly they wanted a system capable of both e-mail and SMS broadcast, and they wanted extreme levels of detail on things about operating system, machine specifications, time to set it up, maintenance requirements, etc.
They also demanded a list of all of my customers, and that is when I decided that this was nothing more than one of the county's contractors trolling for detail and clues. This would be totally typical of the way business is done around here. First, one reasonably expects that the deal is already fixed, they're only soliciting bids "pro forma", to keep up appearances. Secondly, if you can gather information about potential customers for non-county business, that's all good. Third, if you can get people to give technical details about their product offerings which will save your own people time researching their parallel development, that's even better.
I threw that letter into the file drawer marked "lie, cheat, steal, and Nigerian Scams".
This all came about 10 days after an ex-officio consultation when I tried to point out a useful datamining application I had developed to combine State Tax data with County code-violation records, which turned out to be an Automated Slumlord Detector.
In this ex-officio meeting, I was pretty much asked if I wasn't too damned old to be writing code, and was told that my website wasn't aesthetically pleasing because I didn't use the preferred fonts and who the hell picked out the page color. In any case, maybe I should go back to college for four years and then I'd understand the concept and perhaps be able to spell "procurement".
After this, I basically went home and downloaded and installed the Mediawiki software, same thing as Wikipedia uses, and began converting content from the old static HTML pages into Wiki pages. Then I fought spammers for about a week, and tightened up the wiki. Of course I could reproduce this in about a week since the learning curve is past, and I have multiple working instances that are nicely locked down.
I am sure I might have done it in even less time if I wasn't wasting huge amounts of energy fuming over some pup with maybe three years' experience, basically telling me to go fuck off, pops, you can't possibly know shit. Get lost, old man. You don't even have a college degree.
Well, fortunately I got a bit distracted by the final stages of getting my first patent.
I do not have a degree, but I do have a patent. Yet I cannot get a job either working for, or selling to, the Montgomery County government. I do not have a degree, and cannot be hired except for menial jobs, and in menial jobs, I am grossly overqualified with the exception of one little detail which totally excludes me for consideration of a management job in the menial fields: I am not fluent in Spanish.
And aside from that, I'll piss in a cup when the LORD God Almighty personally appears as a bush that burns, lo, but is not consumed, and speaks with the voice of a whirlwind and tells me "henceforth you will be pleased to cooperate with fascism".
So: to answer some of those questions:
Cost of equipment: $3000.00 per unit.
Lead time to instantiation: 10 days, less if there's an actual crisis.
Time to install given superuser access on an established machine: 8 hours.
My billable rate to do this sort of thing, outside of initial installation: $50/hour
Per job, this task, server already provided: $1000.
Those are just the things that cost money, and for that, there's Mastercard, eh? For grinning like a possum eatin' shit at the kid who told me to get a degree you feeble old bastard, goddamn priceless.
But what would be actual gravy would be having them pay me to use the patent I got, rather than the degree I don't need for this sort of work, to create multiple instances with read-only virus-proof media and preconfigured IP addresses and military-class security.
And yes, "Sahana" does in fact do SMS broadcast so that all of the kiddies with their cellphones can get their "Silver Alert" and go hunting for escaped Alzheimer's patients.
Or maybe the County can contact the authors to work directly with them, though they might not be willing to fly in from Sri Lanka in order to piss in a cup.
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