Today, I took more photos at the Habitat site and made some good progress on my work project. There's now a kludge around a frustrating bug. Also, one of my friends hurt her back, and I had to fetch her computer equipment for her. By the time I got to her house, it was about 10:30, and I felt pretty bad. She was pretty gracious about it, though, considering that she's a lot more diurnal than I am.

There's been some more good discussion on the disaster relief software lists, though I was a little too busy today to respond much. It's cool that we're talking with a lot of people and taking better advantage of existing FOSS resources; I'm starting to feel more optimistic about the effort than I did earlier.

Tags: disaster, photography, volunteer

The ShelterFinder group has been talking about using a FOSS disaster relief product called Sahana, which is based on Drupal. The name means "relief" in Sinhalese. I really like the idea of leveraging existing technology rather than rolling our own. Hopefully, we should be able to write modules if we need to, and share those with the Sahana community. At this point, I'm interested in GIS and feeds (e.g., RSS, GeoRSS), so I guess the next step will be checking out what's there. Ultimately, it would also be nice to see some widely-used standards for disaster data and metadata.

Tags: disaster, sahana, volunteer