 I'm delighted to welcome Michael Hauden to the skipped stage. He's the CEO of the Sahana Software Foundation. He has nine years of humanitarian tech-related experience, has lived in Thailand and Indonesia doing humanitarian-related work and worked in Asia and Africa extensively. Welcome, Michael. To be here today, I'm actually an Auckland native My journey started just across the road studying at the engineering school here doing computer systems engineering. Like many of the other presenters, after working in the industry for a couple of years I really wanted to do something more. Maybe my underpants were on the outside and had a bit of a superhero complex. I wanted to save the world. So after the Indian Ocean tsunami, I headed over to Indonesia and basically started knocking on doors of NGOs until someone took me on as a volunteer. Now, I originally thought, like, computer programming, and that field, sort of when you're looking at disasters like this. But when I started sort of seeing these organizations, seeing how they operate, I realized these are huge operations and they need IT skills just as much as any other operation. I also identified the enemy. The enemy is Excel. The entire humanitarian industry is run on Excel. There are 100 million dollar projects like accounting systems on Excel. So it had almost the past 10 years to make a better solution than just Excel. And through this, I've also realized that this is really hard. And one of the reasons, and I think this is one of the things you have to accept, Excel is actually really good at a lot of things. And one of the things it's really good at is giving people a lot of flexibility. Want to add another column? Pretty much any user can do that. And the thing I've realized is when you're coming with solutions, you're taking away some of that flexibility from people. You're disempowering them. Do you want to add another column? Well, we've got the data model. This is the data model. We'd have to recode it to add another column. It gives them a lot of flexibility on how to analyze data and how to make their own charts. So I think this is one of my learnings, is when you're looking at your bright new Sushani solution, what is it disrupting? What are you taking away from people? Another example is when you're looking at database solutions, you may be looking at sharing information more widely. Are you disrupting a monopoly where one person held all the records and that gave them authority and power? So these are some of the things we need to be mindful of when we're working in the humanitarian domain. After building a better Excel, creating a very simple logistics database for International Rescue Committee was the first organization that I was working for, one of the logos that Chris came up with. They had a simple, it was actually an access database, which I sort of extended and deployed in a number of offices in Indonesia. Now I even did a really good job or a really bad job because next they sent me to Pakistan, which was a really interesting working environment, for both the disaster of the earthquake, which happened in 2006, I think it was, but also the ongoing refugees from Afghanistan had been there since the late 70s. So these are two very different contexts, and this is one of the remote warehouses in the tribal areas of Pakistan on the border of Afghanistan. They had a computer, no internet though, so having to build solutions that worked in that sort of environment. I was also sent to Uganda, no this is one of them, where I was working, and one of the things you see a lot of, Excel is really, I came to realise if you've got a really good Excel spreadsheet that's a really good starting point, because most of the time you had files like this or just information wasn't organised. And one of the challenges is you've got this idea of a solution, but what do they have in place at the moment? How are you collecting information at the moment? So I now work with Sahana. Sahana also has its origin in the tsunami, but on the other side of the Indian Ocean in Sri Lanka. There after the tsunami, a group of tech enthusiasts, open source enthusiasts, got together and had a problem. And people talk about the second tsunami and Chris sort of referred to it. It's what some of us call the organizations, and there's a lot of people who coordinate these resources, so you're going to overlap and avoiding gaps. So the first deployment of Sahana, which we're just showing a screenshot here of, unfortunately not the entire screenshot because they used a copyrighted image, which we've had a few legal issues with recently, so I've had to blank that out. But basically an organisation registry, who's doing what where is one of the basic things, is what organisations are responding, where are they responding, what resources do they have? Having a request management, where are the needs, where are they coming from? Looking at a person registry, so being able to identify and help reunify missing people. A camp registry, so helping to manage camps like this, where are they who's supporting these camps, what resources do they need? So Sahana was one of the first humanitarian open source projects, and this was 10 years ago. So a lot of this has evolved since then, and I'm just going to talk a bit briefly about some of the projects that I've worked on with Sahana in the past five years. First I just wanted to quickly talk about the disaster management cycle. Now Chris touched on the response component of this and some of the preparation. But really disaster management, I think a lot of people when they think disaster management, it's a response, it's what you see on the news. But disaster management is something that happens all of the time. And I think Noel, the work he's talking about is a great example of some of the sort of preparation you can do which might not be directly involved. I mean, when you've got councils putting together plans, when you've got things like planting mangroves to mitigate storm surges, these are all sort of part of disaster management activities. And I think it's important to think of it holistically, not necessarily in a linear sort of one comes after another as this sort of diagram indicates. Because more and more we're pushing towards these things happening in parallel. And I think technology and better access to information is one of the things that allows this really work. On the work that Noel's doing is when you know, when you've got good data on who owns what land, then when you're starting to do your response you can also integrate and start your recovery at the same time so you're not building temporary shelters on temporary land but you can actually start building shelters on people's own land because you know that information and you don't have to go into another survey process after you've started your response effort. So this is I think one of the things that we can really help with is integrating all of this and that means the response is quicker and the recovery is quicker which is a really important thing. I mean, I was in Indonesia for two and a half years over various segments of time but last time I was there was almost five years after the tsunami and you still had people living in temporary shelters then so you really have to appreciate that response and recovery can be a long process and I think we're seeing that in Christchurch as well. So some of the deployments of Sahana I've worked on, this is the resource management system and these are all different themes and different configurations of Sahana. This is a deployment that we did for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent. We gave them a range of different functionality. The key functionality that they're using here is the volunteer management. The Red Cross has 93 million volunteers around the world. Now I'm not quite sure how they came up with that number because the majority of these volunteer records will be in a handwritten register under somewhere. Now that information will be collected and aggregated but the majority of those records won't be digitized. Now I think at the moment we have just over 100,000 volunteer records in this so we're getting there but still a long way to go. There are a number of other modules that we gave to them. We actually did some work on an assessment module, some of the challenges that Chris was talking about. That was a really interesting project to work on because you can design an assessment piece of software but you've got to look at how it fits into the organization and we had throughout the Red Cross you have different national societies and each national society has its own assessment templates and some of these templates, the information they were trying to collect didn't make a lot of sense. Some of it could have been baseline information that you collect in advance. Some of it was really not specific are you looking at just a village or are you looking at a district? How would that information be aggregated and how would you actually act on that information? When we dug further we found out that a lot of these times the actual template, the actual systematic process of collecting information and the disaster assessment wasn't really used that much. It was more about people driving off on the back of motorbikes, inter-villages, assessing with their eyes, maybe filling out a form. Those forms would come back to the office, sort of be put under a desk. People would talk locally about what they thought needed to be done and then we're looking, and this is in Indonesia, they hit off part of the process, the conditions you have involved in that. So this is just a show of the resource management system being used in the Philippines and the operations system centre there. Another project was working with the Government Department of Social Welfare and Development in the Philippines. Now this is a great example where I think is one of the strengths of open source, it's about building local capacity. We often think when we think about humanitarian response we think about the United Nations, the international organisations, but really the most important actors in humanitarian response are the local agencies and especially the local governments and this is often really challenging when you have highly resourced international organisations coming into a country with poor governance, poor local government, and there's often a tension there where really the responsibility should be with the governments but the resources are with these international, often western organisations. So there's a tension here and I think one of the things that open source software can do is we can help to build that local capacity. So here in 2012 we spent a week in the Philippines working with a government software team. We went through a code sprint where it was a combination of training, we'd done some virtual training in advance, trying to make the most of our in-person time and during that time we went through a number of tasks that they needed to deploy. Sorry, some slides around the wrong way. Just the solution here and it was basically a relief, good and inventory monitoring system. So this meant when Typhoon Haiyan struck the next year they had the system set up and we were able to use it to help track the majority of the relief goods that were distributed through the government. So I think this is a really great example of how humanitarian open source technology can build local capacity. These slides here actually later on in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy hit New York we were also able to deploy Sahana there working with the Occupy Sandy movement to help give them a solution to manage and you can see all of the donated goods and help, this is me working with a couple of their team there, help coordinate requests for those goods to distribution centres. And this is a great example and another one of the strengths is I see open source technology can allow really good transfer of knowledge between sort of, as Kate said, whether it's whether you call it developing and developed countries, the North and the South. But one of the things I'm seeing is there's similarities between these two contexts and open source technology allows us to take learnings from Philippines and apply them in New York and vice versa. The next example is a solution that we did working funded by the UN but working with the government in East Timor, Timor-Leste and this was to design a disaster management information system and this is just a really a simple solution to help them organise a variety of information both before disasters to support sort of coordination and collaboration and building relationships between the different stakeholders there and in response to disasters. You can vaguely see it here but we did a lot of work to make a really intuitive interface sort of a news feeds type style. We thought what's a way of sharing information that people are familiar with and when they said, hey, this is just like using Facebook we knew we kind of actually succeeded because it was something they could really use quite easily. Not the best example but I just dropped it in but one of the things we use heavily in Sahana is we really rely on a lot of the open-street map baseline data and a lot of the contexts we work they have the best maps and what we try and do is sort of a value add. The next project I'd like to share with you is a community resilience mapping project we did in Los Angeles and this is working with a number of different community coalitions and going around and combining sort of baseline data with information from local government, US census data, US geographical sort of hazard map data to allow communities to get a better understanding of their own resilience and sort of map what resources and what all communities. One of the things working in this environment that was really apparent is who really adopts adopts these sort of technology solutions and we worked with eight different community coalitions and we found that the most engaged users were typically white, male, highly educated and I think it's really when you're talking about technology and early adopters there are going to be some people who can engage really easily this is really familiar to them and there's going to be people who this isn't so accessible to them. One of the things that Kate talked about about printing out maps is absolutely critical. I mean we went in there initially with like here's your web map because this is what we're really comfortable with but for a lot of people a map is still a book and so it's about working out what they're comfortable with and making that focus on accessibility. So just talking a bit about where Sahana is now there's been a number of versions and different revisions and a couple of rewrites of the project of the software over the past 10 years as it's been going. The current version is Sahana Eden there was a long debate about that name some use it as an acronym for emergencies, development, environment I actually proposed it because I come from Mount Eden which is a suburb just sort of five kilometers that way. It's a web application it's built on the Web2Py framework which some of you might be familiar with using Python. We've really focused on a RAD rapid application development framework so it's really easy to deploy instances and to create new modules. Now there's a bit of a double-edged sword there it's really easy to write modules it's really easy to write that code but to get people to use it to get people to get value out of that is something which is much more challenging and I think that's something to be really mindful of when you're engaging in humanitarian open source technology is the technology I say technology is easy people are hard so you can have the best solution but you've still got to get people to use it and I mean one of the one blog posts I read is the technology is actually only 10% of the solution and the rest is sort of working with people making sure that there's user guides on how people can use the software making sure it's really I think one of the key things it's adding value to them and in that value equation you've got to keep in mind of the cost adopting any new technology there's a cost to that so we've got to make sure the value outweighs that cost and that people are prepared to make that initial investment we've got a full restful API and we support data integration through XML, JSON, Excel it's the enemy but we're still trying to subvert it and CSV and I think this is one of the other things there's a lot of different technologies around at the moment I was talking to someone the other day and they're like how do you choose the best technology do we have to have one platform and I said no that's never going to happen one of the key critical things though is to make sure that different platforms can talk to each other we do a lot of work on open data standards and making sure that different solutions can inter-operate so that you don't have to have everyone using the same solution one of the things we put a lot of work into and you've seen a number of different screenshots that all look quite different is different themes and different templates to allow Sahana to be configured and used in lots of different contexts so this is what we've been doing over the past years I've actually only recently come on as the CEO of Sahana six months ago and one of our focuses now is to really we've done all these deployments we've worked on a lot of different contexts and a lot of people say every context is different every country is different and every disaster is different and there's some truth to that but there's also a lot of similarities and I think that's where we can actually and one of our aims at the moment strategic goals for the next year is to look at really putting a lot more investment into the core default generic Sahana so that some people have something that they can easily use out of the box and that's not just the technology but that's the training material and sort of guides on how they can deploy it how they can integrate it implemented in the organizations as well so if any of you are interested in contributing and engaging with this here's a link on how to get started or just come and have a chat to me this is sort of a more technical if you're interested in contributing code but as I said coders not there's only a sort of 10% of the solution there's a lot more we're trying to get better communication material better engagement we're trying to engage stakeholders to set up local branches throughout the world as well so there's a lot of work to be done so if any if you are interested in getting involved especially if you're based in Auckland I'm based here too and I'm hoping to do some events later on in the year here just talking more generally about humanitarian open source one of the key differences between humanitarian open source and open source projects this is maybe a bit of a generalization but in most open source projects you've got users and then contributors to that project are sort of a subgroup of those users it's people who've dived in who found out that they've got an itch to scratch and they scratch that itch contributing maybe they found a bug and they fixed that bug now humanitarian open source projects are different in that respect the majority of users are people who have no interest in contributing to an open source project in terms of code and there's a lot of debate around this in terms of just being a user and giving good feedback also not going to be users of that code and I think that means that we have to put additional thought into how do we make these solutions accessible for people who aren't us for people who aren't like us for people who don't have the same skills as us to telling people to say to making accessible for people to learn how to install it how to use it telling people to go and fork a repository on github for the majority of users we deal with and I think we even need just to watch our language because I mean it's not just over your head it's like that's not something for me and I think it's something we really need to be I mean in terms of accessibility an open source license is really I think there's a lot of I totally agree with that but for most people and most users that doesn't make it accessible that they may might not even understand most of the organizations we've worked with many of them don't even care about the fact that it's open source they just want a solution I think it's really valuable that we've been able to sort of cross-pollinate development that we've done between things that have been funded by the Red Cross the UN, the government and the US as well but I think that accessibility thing it means that we have to have more focus on design better user experience and user interfaces so that people don't have to sort of read long manuals or explore for themselves to really reducing that investment that people need to make to start using the humanitarian tech so that's all I think it's lunchtime now and we're coming back 120 so thank you very much for listening and look forward to the panel discussion afterwards