Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Help Needed for developing a software for Coordination

Dear Bro Saif Manzoor sahib and Tahir bhai,

AA

Bro Saif, do you have any idea about coordination software, where we could all pool all available information and desirous could benefit from there.

For example, back in EQ 2005 days, one of the companies developed www.zalzala.com and many contributed to it, it had a Pakistani EQ effected map, that could be zoomed in, untill the small villages and localities were available. By clicking on it you will find a template a two column table, of items that were available and the other contained that were needed. This included the road access, and reasons for not availability of access.

My students from UAAR, used to populate this table by collecting infor from different sources on mobiles, timings of updates and the person who updated were also recorded to keep track of information and status of improvement.

We and many found it very useful, after few days you could log in and see it well populated and you could locate that loads of trucks are waiting for distribution just few kilometers away on the turn of the road, and such and such road is blocked. We did include the informers info in there, so that for later updates s/he could be contacted or information could be confirmed.

I am copying this to some of my friends who were in meeting on this sunday, where we were reminded of the need of such an information resource.

Many of us, like Dr Ijaz Bashir, who is working Flood Relief work and is not aware of demographics, population data and nor the state of FR goods already sent to a place. He has a good infra structure and has his people at all main stations where his Relief work is based. Secondly from the information which he has we cannot benefit. Statistics collated by Population department are not available, and a person (like Saeed Baig sahib) thinking of taking care of a village of say 40-50 households is not available.

I think there could be many examples of information that is crucial and if available it can help us avoiding the wastage of resources etc. For example I was amazed to know that University of Agriculture Faisalabad, has spent 2-3 crore Rs in rehabilitation work in these few weeks and has put an army of 2400 students who belonged to this area and are studying at UAF. This local force will make a significant contribution to rehab and livelihood work.

Realizing the importance of topic I am including few more names with expectation that they will help us in finalizing the needs/requirements of such a software.

Hence all please contribute, they way you like it should be.

Regards
Afzal
afzal537@gmail.com


No comments:

Post a Comment