Humanitarian FOSS community

The HFOSS community is a very active, worldwide community that actively promotes and contributes to the development and distribution of free, open source software solutions for the support of humanitarian action.

The concept of humanitarian FOSS has been inspired by the Sahana project - a free, open source disaster management system that provides an integrated set of web-based tools for data management and activity coordination in humanitarian operations after large scale disasters. The Sahana project itself has been incepted in Sri Lanka during the relief efforts after the Indian Ocean Tsunami Disaster 2004/2005, and since then it has been deployed in various other disaster relief actions worldwide. Sahana is still being one of the core projects of the HFOSS community.

Beside Sahana, another pathbreaking initiative of the HFOSS community is the Humanitarian FOSS Project - a collaborative community building project that was started by a group of computing faculty and open source proponents at Trinity College, Wesleyan University, and Connecticut College (USA). The Humanitarian FOSS Project is building a community of academic computing departments, IT corporations, and local and global humanitarian and community organizations dedicated to building and using free and open source software to benefit humanity.