IP and Software: Seminar Explores Emerging Trends and Prospects

In the wake of the devastating tsunami which hit South East Asia in 2004, the government of Sri Lanka struggled to coordinate the mammoth relief effort. As more and more governments, international organizations and volunteers joined crisis operations to locate missing people and distribute aid, the basic problem of managing information became critical to the humanitarian effort. An urgent solution was needed, which would be fast, flexible and freely accessible.

To the rescue

Enter Sahana, described by its developers as the world's first disaster management system based on free and open source software. Sanjiva Weerawarana, who led the development of the Sahana system, delivered a vivid account of the project to a rapt audience at WIPO's recent regional seminar on Intellectual Property and Software in the 21st Century in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Describing the "tremendous information management problem" which arose from the efforts of some 1,300 organizations to support hundreds of thousands of displaced people, Mr. Weerawarana recounted how Sri Lanka's open source community pooled their talents and knowledge, and worked flat out to develop a solution. The new software was up and running in just three weeks.

After its successful deployment during the tsunami disaster, the project was developed further for global use. The award-winning system now offers a secure web portal with applications for tracking missing people, connecting organizations, matching donations to requests, reporting on the distribution of aid and services, tracking temporary shelters, and generally providing transparency to groups working in a humanitarian disaster. Available for free download and customization under a GNU General Public License, Sahana has been used extensively by UN and humanitarian agencies during recent crises including the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, the 2006 Southern Leyte mudslide disaster in the Philippines, and the 2006 Jogjarkata earthquake in Indonesia.

Common ground

Mr. Weerawarana heads the Lanka Software Foundation, a non-profit, open source software development organization. He was invited to address the WIPO regional Seminar in order to share his perspective as a proponent of open source solutions. In a central session devoted to Business Models and Licensing in the Software Industry, he was joined on the podium by Stephen Mutkoski, Microsoft's Asia...