EUROSHA

The Sahana Software Foundation has partnered with ​France Volontaires, ​Groupe URD, the ​Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) and other European voluntary organizations on a project that recently received approval for funding by the EU/ECHO and for which we have recently begun work.

The objective of the project (now called EUROSHA for "EURopean Open Source Humanitarian Aid") is to train a small group of European volunteers (recruited through ​EVHAC ) to do humanitarian information data collection in four disaster prone African countries: Chad, the Central African Republic, Burundi and Kenya. These volunteers will be trained to record point of interest information for important facilities (such as organization/NGO and UN agency offices, airports, warehousing facilities, hospitals and medical facilities) and other "3W" project information and store it in Sahana Eden; they will also be trained to use OpenStreetMap to improve road and other map data in these countries.

SSF will be hosting a site for this data to be stored and used by humanitarian agencies in these countries, and potentially this project could be expanded later into a global open data repository of such data.

We have identified a small number of new features (and found a few minor defects) that will be developed in the Eden trunk to support this project. These have been entered into trac as tickets tagged as "EVHAC".

Important Links

• ​EVHAC Call for Volunteers
• ​Main EUROSHA Volunteers Site (not live yet)
• ​Sahana Eden EUROSHA Site (development and testing currently)
• ​Sahana Pootle Translation Site

Project Schedule

• through August 18: Development of Features required for Project
• August 19-25: QA & User Acceptance Testing
• September: Finalize updates to system and server based on QA/UAT, complete French translation/localization, complete training materials
• October 1, 2012: Training of EVHAC volunteers in use of Sahana Eden
• October 2012-August 2013: Support for live use of site

Community participation

There are a number of areas where we would welcome volunteer assistance in the execution and delivery of this project:

• User Acceptance Testing: We will be reviewing the functionality of the Sahana Eden site against user requirements and for usability during the week of August 20-24. No particular technical skills or knowledge/experience of using Eden is required (in fact, it might be of benefit to have some folks unfamiliar with Eden poke around it). Non-coders and domain experts are particularly welcome here.
• User Interface: We will be making simple minor modifications to the front page of Eden to support this project; if someone would like to work on a custom theme (color scheme, logos, etc.) to make the site more attractive, that would be most welcome. Ideally, this would be completed by August 18th such that it can be included in the QA/UAT but no later than the end of August such that the training materials can be completed with accurate screen captures.
• Translation into French: We need to complete and review the French translation of Eden (at least for the modules being deployed here) by the end of September.
• Fixes and feature requests: There are a number of items that we've identified as enhancements or fixes to Eden as part of our review process that would be desirable to have but are not required for this project. For the most part, these have not yet been entered into trac but will be soon. These will likely not be tagged as EVHAC tickets or if they are they will be given a priority of "trivial" to distinguish them from the required elements to the project. There is no timeline on these. Just more tickets for coders to work on.

If you would like to contribute to this project in one of these areas, please e-mail mark (at) sahanafoundation (dot) org.