Sahana Eden
Sahana Eden is an Application Development Kit designed to build database-driven web applications tailored for emergency and humanitarian management. It provides a robust foundation for application developers and IT service providers to meet the information management needs of aid organizations and governmental agencies during emergencies, disaster preparedness, and humanitarian operations.
Eden is free and open-source software (FOSS) that can be freely used, modified, extended, and integrated by anyone without restrictions.
As an open project, Eden fosters collaboration and the exchange of knowledge, experiences, and best practices among humanitarian organizations. The project is guided by input from experienced aid organizations worldwide and emphasizes the use of open technology and standards. Nearly all of Eden’s code is developed in close cooperation with humanitarians in the field, ensuring it is directly aligned with real-world needs.
Implementing Eden
Sahana Eden is a multi-purpose web application written for the web2py framework.
The appearance and business logic of this application can be adjusted to the needs of a particular deployment by altering settings in the models/000_config.py configuration file on the server. Such adjustments can be minimal, or (more commonly) be extensive customization involving menus, forms, user roles, workflows, data models and even processing logic - so that Eden can be repurposed and adapted for many different use-cases and scenarios.
Rather than putting all these customizations into one server-side configuration file, they would normally be implemented as Python packages which are then imported as configuration templates. This way, complex custom configurations can be developed, tested and maintained away from the server - and can easily be shared and re-used in other deployments.
An Eden application is understood as such a re-usable configuration template (or a combination of templates), and Application Development is focused on these templates.
A small selection of configuration templates is included in the Eden code base. However, downstream projects will often develop their own templates, and may publish and/or market them independently - a business model which we encourage and support.
How to Contribute
What to Do
Code
- Issues are a good starting point for short-term contribution
- Blueprints describe more complex feature sets and requirements, best suited for longer-term contribution
- Many core modules are looking for a maintainer, who takes long-term overall responsibility for their continuous development, support and documentation. Tell us on our mailing list what you would be interested in leading, and we will guide you to the role.
Documentation
- Our Handbook for Application Developers needs continuous maintenance and improvement. You can work on the handbook in the code base.
- If you want to contribute to this wiki, you can start by discussing your idea on our mailing list - we will then create a wiki account for you as needed.