Electric Josh

Software guy in Sri Lanka spending his time now doing IT work to coordinate 12,000 (!) NGO's working there. Small chunk of a long, fascinating post:

At 5pm we met with the logistics person at the UN DAC (not sure what that stands for) organization which is handling all incoming planeloads of stuff at the airport. Aramex has given (or donated; not sure) their logistics system along with a trained person and that's now running .. that system keeps excellent coordination of consignments until it gets handed over to someone.

The problem is what happens after it gets handed over. Well, no one knows right now .. no one knows whether it was actually delivered to the needy locations or is sitting in a warehouse somewhere else or whatever.

They want us to aggregate the needs that we get from various places and to publish reports that they can put into the central UN Web site for relief needs. After that they'd like to tie up with the system at the airport to track what happens to stuff after it leaves the airport via the trading system at the NGO level.

What's incredible is that there doesn't appear to be software for this stuff and all these agencies which deal with disasters regularly don't have all this shit automated. Incredible. Well, we're going to build our stuff (openly/freely) and we'll be happy to share it with the other affected countries or anyone else.