OStatic

Collabbit: A New FOSS Tool for Emergency Management

We've covered some of the many strong open source applications and platforms aimed at humanitarian efforts. They include tools for disaster relief management, earthquake research and management applications, and mobile healtchcare efforts aimed at developing countries. Now, there is a new open source emergency response center application called Collabbit, housed on Google Code and aimed at coordination between groups and individuals during disasters.

As Collabbit's home page makes clear, the application is under active development but won't be released in final form for a couple of months. According to the site:

"As a communication tool, Collabbit aims to facilitate inter- and intracommittee communication in case of a disaster or other event that requires coordination between multiple organizations or individual users. The system is centered around instances (such as disasters) which have updates, intended to provide progress reports about the instance. Updates are submitted by users on behalf of committees; they have a description and may contain attached files. The system also provides a contact directory where users can be found based on their agencies and committees."

Collabbit is a rewrite, using Ruby On Rails, of a previous project called VirtualEOC (Virtual Emergency Operations Center). It sends out its missives to people that it is coordinating through RSS and text messages. The project is overseen by the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) organization, which offers a number of other humanitarian open source applications. 

• Collabbit
• Emergency Response
• Humanitarian

by Will Anderson on Oct. 05, 2009

Hi Sam,

Thank you for writing this post on Collabbit! I read Ostatic everyday and it's very exciting to see a post about one of my projects on the blog.

Collabbit is in the middle of a rewrite, as you mentoned. The group at the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Project created a proof of concept prototype in two and a half weeks for a disaster exercise this past summer. We've taken the lessons and feedback from that experience and have redesigned the software to be even easier to use.

The target agencies are excited by the development process and final product. For many of these agencies it will be their first time using free and open source software.

Both the project team and user community are excited by the development so far. That said, we're a small team and would definitely appeciate more volunteers of the technical/programming bent.

If anyone reading this would like more information about contributing their time and skills please email me williamv dot Anderson at gmail or go to http://collabbit.hfoss.org and send us an email.

Thanks again,

Will Anderson

Collabbit Project

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