Finally, the IEEE paper i co-authored with several other SAHANA colleagues , under the guidance of Prof. Louiqa Raschid is available in IEEEXplore. The paper was presented in 2006 at the
2nd International Conference on Information and Automation (ICIA) in Sri Lanka.

The full paper is avaliable at

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4250242&isnumber=4250171

I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate at Open Source Health Care Alliance(OSCHA) 2007 conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. My interest was in integrating health care systems with Disaster Management solutions.

what i wanted to give and take back from this conference was
"How SAHANA can be a data collection source for health care".

As i see there are two perspectives to this

1. SAHANA is deployed at the time of disaster and disaster victim
data ,shelter data,ect that is collected can be used by health care
applications. "Disasters are followed by health concerns and problems, what ever the type of disaster. Therefore healthcare workers must be aware of and be familiar with Sahana, as they will also be able to use the information to anticipate and plan healthcare initiatives."

hmm... at last i found some time to blog some thing i should have done 3 months back. I was a facilitator at Asia Source 11 camp in Indonesia, which was held from January 22-30 2007.

It was one of the best events i ever participated.
For 8 days we learned/taught various FOSS applications.

Main take back home for me was the opportunity to understand different cultures and create connections with various people. with 120 odd participants there was representation from all parts of the world. every morning we had morning presentations from each track (participants were divided among 4 tracks), and I was in Track 4 with my SAHANA colleague Mifan Careem(http://techmania.wordpress.com). Of course we presented SAHANA and as a result we have various interested groups that initiated important work in Disaster Management. These morning presentations were very creative and displayed the artistic side of these techie geeks. you can see one of those uploaded clips at our friendly FOSS doctors blog (http://fossyfrancis.multiply.com/)