At the risk of burning some Karma, and whoring our own FOSS disaster project... ;)

If anyone is interested in being involved in a FOSS project for disasters, the Sahana Software Foundation is very interested in getting more developers involved in writing software to be used in disaster and emergency management. Sahana was created in Sri Lanka in early 2005 following the tsunami in late 2004. Since then Sahana has been deployed to a number of events in various countries (China, Peru, Philippines, Pakistan, India etc).

Coming back to Haiti, we have deployed our new Python version of Sahana, and it has been very well received, including by the likes of SOUTHCOM and the World Food Programme. In addition, we have been pushing a lot of standards for emergency interoperability, and due to some of our early work implementing the Emergency Data eXchange Language (EDXL) - Hospital AVailability Extension (HAVE), we have a lot of interest in not only FOSS, but also open standards.

We are looking for assistance in further developing Sahana, and these are some of the key skills we are looking for to help with our existing deployment in Haiti (note you don't need them all to be able to work on Sahana):

# Python - all the core coding is undertaken in Python
# web2py - this is the application framework that we use in Python for SahanaPy
# OpenLayers - this is the client javascript library we use for mapping in the browser
# jQuery - additional view tweaks are done using this JavaScript library
# XSLT/XPath - a lot of import/export functionality is created using XSLT templates written using XPath

For more info on our Haiti response, and if you want to help out, check out this wiki page: http://trac.sahanapy.org/wiki/Haiti
Alternatively, jump into #sahana on freenode. If you want to contact me directly, email me - gt at kestrel dot co dot nz

If you read this far, thanks for the attention :)

Cheers Gavin
Board Member, Sahana Software Foundation

Wow - brings back memories ;) I think it was 1993 at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. A stage 2 computer science source said we could use the lab for programming, or we could install this thing called Slackware Linux that had gcc and everything we needed for out projects. So, of course I did. Mmmm, floppy installs. So, it was mainly used early on for COSC assignments. A few years later setup Red Hat as a DNS and webserver in 1996 for our fledgling web development company. In later years after I stepped out of the IT field continued to use it for servers in our small business, although starting to fix it up with OS X as well. Never used it as a desktop - have primarily been Windows, and over the last nearly 5 years OS X (which seems to be a fantastic compromise).

But yeah, the first thing was COSC programming assignments in '93.