Welcome to new Sri Lanka

By now we know and believe Velupillai and Other terrorist leaders are killed by our Armed Forces or they have suicide. We knew this will end soon. I like to give my sincere gratitude to our Three forces, Police, Civil security forces and Mr. President for scarifying their life for the future of Sri Lanka and for our lives.


I salute you all!!.

A disaster happened, what should we do?

As at today, the war is officially over but rescue missions are still undergoing in Sri Lanka to securely rescue Tamil civilians trapped in LTTE barbarians. This is the final few days of Prabhakaran and his followers. So I'll not talk about him or LTTE here now.

We saw hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from LTTE to safe zone controlled by SL government. All of them are residing in refuge camps. They need food, water, cloths, medicine, sanitary facilities and many other general human needs. And the great thing is people around the country were organized and collected many essentials and quickly sending them to those areas with the message "We all are a one big family, we love you". This has being the one and only humanitarian war ever happened in the world and will be on the history books for sure.

Now that we had a disaster, and we see the aftermath too. But on the other hand, we are getting lots of goods and services to this affected areas from all around the country and globe. We need a proper Disaster Management plan to handle the received donations such as food, water, cloths, medics, etc. This remembers me the Tsunami 2006. We did not had a proper disaster management plan or a system (manual or computerized) so we wasted lots of valuable goods received for afforded areas. And distribution of the donations were highly disorganized where some areas receive excessive amount of donations and another area had nothing at all. So we had that experience, no need to repeat that same process.

We need to mange the donations (all types) properly so that each and every one gets the proper benefit out of those donations without wasting them. Here it comes the need of a well structured computerized Disaster Management System. Ok... do we have to spend another million rupee on this? Absolutely not. There is this free and open source software system call "Sahana" (www.sahana.lk) developed by Sri Lankan FOSS community, where you can use for these kind of scenarios. You can download it for free, use it conjoining with any number of donating organizations and government. I know most of the organizations using this system today. But this is a reminder for those who still not aware of such system. Next question would be support on using this software, and make it work in your organization/group on the double. There is a strong community support through mailing lists , IRC. And if you want fully featured professional/commercial service you can contact Respere, the Sahana Company (http://www.respere.com/). They provide island wide commercial training, support for Sahana Disaster Management System.

So now that we have donations, and human resources to handle them and a Computer Software System to help manage those donations and also to maintain missing persons registry, where many people are missing and to be found. So I request all the donors, organizations, to be wise, and manage the peoples hardly earned donations so that each and every family member in north will receive the goods and services equally and minimize wastage.

I can see clearly now the war is gone...
I can say all the problems will fly away...
And there will be safer life for all our friends...
It's gonna be a bright, (bright) bright Sunshiny day......