Peter Royal left a comment that ASF member Berin Loritsch is working on crisis management software in his day job. Berin is writing about his experiences on his blog. I had no idea that this was the case (and obviously neither did Sanjiva or the people he talked to), and for some reason Berin's posts aren't showing up in Planet Apache.

Sanjiva is posting again, from Sri Lanka. He's found a way to put his computing skills to good use. He's been talking to the CIO of FEMA, and people at IBM, Microsoft, and Cisco.

The one thing that has become clear today is that we have a tremendous information management problem in our hands.

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.