Italy: Shelters and Evacuees Management

Introduction

We are a team of Italian volunteers who recently started to work on Sahana-Eden to explore if and how it can be used during the emergencies (earthquakes, floods, eruptions) in Italy.

Stakeholders

The final user will be an Italian Organization (the most important organization operating in the field when there are emergencies to coordinate at country level) and the local emergencies unit (which are responsible to setup the first aid to the population). This Organization is the stakeholder who is actively contributing to define the area of interest of Sahana and the required features.

Requirements

The objective of the project is to provide a tool to manage the persons to evacuate (evacuees), find for them the best accommodation, plan their daily needs on time, solve issues they have etc; on the other side this tool will help also the job of the volunteers assigned to manage the shelters because they are the first point of contact for those looking for an accommodation. The tool will speed up the registration process, will support the volunteers in the selection of the right shelter for that specific persons (for example, find a shelter with enough seats available for the entire family/group, find the right shelter for children's or for old men, etc), will track duplicate records and follow the people who moves from on shelter to an other.

We have identified a new module "Evacuees" that will take care of person's data; it will manage the complete profile of persons as well as sensible data (like medical profile or legal information about the person to evacuee) and will take care about who can access this data. First point of contact to require an accommodation are the shelters and we have identified a couple of new features to link the new module to the existing ones and benefits each other from the existing functionalities. The evacuees module will provide features to be manually populated (through the registration process) or to automatically upload the data of citizens involved in the emergency from external data sources. In parallel, for a complete adoption of the entire platform in Italy, we will complete the translation in Italian of the existing Sahana-EDEN (currently uncompleted).

Future Extensions

There are a number of areas where we would like to work on to integrate the new information that the module "evacuees" will generate (like the geo-localization of shelters with tips about the status of guests there, create a concept of "shelter's warehouse" or incident's warehouse to organize the daily task). We will update this page if and when these new topics will be planned (outside this on going phase due to the current schedule).

High level Project Schedule

• through April 2014: Development of Features required for Project
• May 2014: QA & User Acceptance Testing
• May, June: Finalize updates, complete Italian translation/localization, complete training materials

Project Closure

• The project has been completed in November 2014

This project has developed a new template "EVASS" available for free and ready to be enabled when required. It extends the base capabilities of Sahana Eden. It makes available a set of scenarios to manage evacuees (as a single or group), provide them the best accommodation available according to the specific needs. Citizen's data are managed in accordance to the data privacy laws existing in Italy. To properly manage evacuees, the project has also extended the shelters, creating inside them the concept of housing units where the persons are physically hosted. The housing units can be classified as tents or hotel's rooms etc. The shelters can be considered as a sort of Logical containers for evacuees with a total capacity.

Documents

• EVASS User Guide (Italian, PDF 1.1MB)
• EVASS User Guide (English, PDF 1.1MB)

• (Document sources see Attachments)