Sahana Ideas - Using NZ govt's data to enhance community resilience - Mental Download

[Tim McNamara]

Hi all,

I have had the pleasure at being a participant of the Open Government Data Barcamp & Hackfest over the last two days. I have been thinking of ways and means of using the knowledge, skills and contacts that I've met over the weekend. The process has spurred lots of ideas. This email is an attempt to collate them, start some discussion and then some action.

Noting this post is starting threads on a few mailing lists - apologies if this breaks netiquette and you receive this message more than once. However, apart from spam - there are some of the domain-specific discussions that it would be great to get answers to:

Open Govt Data ppl > If you have any information that would be useful to anyone before, during or after an emergency, let us know.

Humanitarian ICT  > Please look at the software/hardware & the voice sections in detail. There must be other people looking at these areas than Sahana and New Zealand.

New Zealanders > Please take a look at the "Sources of Data" most specifically, and see if you can assist.

Sahana Hackers > Any spare capacity to take on some more projects? Take a look at this list! :D

All > Please support the NZ Sahana Cluster's Facebook page, the more support we have the easier it is to get more support. Funny how that works.

Please note: All the user stories are made up. The organisation names are real, but the situations are not.

// Software/Hardware Interaction

Are there any experts that we know if there are open source software libraries that allow . Does anyone know anyone that may know?

PXT > Anyone know ppl anyone from Telecom NZ, Vodafone NZ or 2degrees that would be able to work with a small team of software developers to enable their technology to enable enhanced community response to emergencies?

User story:

Luke and Mary are driving home and notice some significant surface flooding. They would like to send a PXT to their local council to let the authorities know that something should be done about it.

Packet Radio

User Story:

Rodney District Council have a wide repeater network in place, but poor Internet connectivity. They would like to use packet radio to spread information via their existing emergency resistant communications network. 

Pagers

User Story:

Manawatu-Wanganui Civil Defence Emergency Management Group have several staff issued with pagers. They would like to send messages to them via the web.

(Have left out the obvious iPhone & Android app field, because that side of things is very sexy right now and probably doesn't need help)

// Sources of Data

Does anyone know where this information is available to be used by organisations deploying Sahana? Where info is available, would anyone like to help build things to use it?

Aerial Photography

If anyone has experience with UMN MapServer and would like to migrate this dataset of New Zealand's aerial photopgraphy for use with Sahana, please get in touch.

Weather

Are there any local sources of weather information, ideally sourced from MetService / NIWA in the manner of NOAA's? MetConnect is pretty good, but is this information made available as a web service? It's a pain to have to open up a second web browser for weather information. I know this information is fee-based, but can we create a capacity for Sahana to allow people to provide credentials to access that information in its own Situation Awareness module.

If not, is there anyone who would like to work to create a Yahoo! or Weather.com feed reader for Sahana?

Infrastructure General - GIS

Anyone know of a GIS layers infrastructure networks? E.g. gas mains, water pipes, cell sites, power grid, roading info? I imagine that this information is currently held in many different areas.  Ideally would like to bundle these up as part of a NZ-specific Sahana package.

Infrastructure - Roading Specific

The NZTA's InfoConnect looks like a great service, enabling websites like http://maps.aa.co.nz/traffic/roadwatch. Is anyone interested in creating an open source software library that makes use of the API?

Community Infrastructure / Points of Interest

Would anyone like to take up the challenge of making the http://nzopengps.org/ maps into the Sahana codebase?

// Voice

Network management

Use of Sahana as a tool to assist radio network control stations. This would enable volunteers to log in, assist with the selection of appropriate frequencies, etc etc. (Kudos to Dan Zubey, from the USA, who has been working hard to produce this for his local branch of the equivalent of AREC) 

Auto Record / Log Radio Messages

Is is possible to use Radio NZ's software (or some open source solution) to record voice messages received over UHF/VHF voice as Ogg Vorbis or MP3? This recorded info information then be archived for future use / review.

Are there any open source voice to text transcription libraries around?

// Messaging

XMPP

Is there any interest in pillaging an Firefox plugin that is Jabber/XMPP client and creating a front end to via the Administration module of Sahana to the XMPP server? (I don't even know if this is technically possible, advice required!)

http://status.net/ (Previously known as Laconica)

A few of us began work on creating an "Alert" header that a root user (Incident Controller/Commander in emergency management speak) would be able to send to all the users of the system. We were using the jQuery and its AJAX glitter. There's lots of promise to be able to quickly spread information to all users of a particular Sahana instance and keep tabs on what's important in other Sahana instances.

Twitter

Everyone's in love with Twitter at the moment. Probably because it has a super-simple API. Sahana should probably extend its Messaging client from purely SMS & email to this medium. Any takers?

//Demographic Visualisations

Kudos to Gordon Anderson.

We can use census data from Statistics NZ to plot the densities of where older people live, down to meshblock locations. This would be of tremendous benefit for emergency planning.

Cheers all,

Tim McNamara

  @timClicks

  Sahana Project Management Committee

  New Zealand Sahana Cluster Coordinator