The role of SAMBRO as Cross-Agency Situational-Awareness Platform for Disaster Risk Management
Biplov Bhandari et al.
Philippines, Maldives, and Myanmar have a lot of coastal regions and therefore are vulnerable to natural disasters. One of the major challenge for the government is to maintain an effective coordination and cooperation among different governmental and non-governmental organization (McEntire, 2002). International development agenda such as the Sendai Framework advocates the implementation of Early Warning System (EWS) by the national governments to reduce the risk (Pearson & Pelling, 2015). But as most of the existing early warning systems vary as per different organizations, the existing problem becomes more pronounced. On the other hand, free and open source softwares together with cross-agency situational awareness platforms and the interoperable data standards like Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) and various other ICT advancements are presenting themselves as a solution to this complex problem (O?Donnell & Pagotto, 2012). Sahana Alerting and Messaging Broker (SAMBRO) is designed to increase the coordination among different organization and act as a warning broker to bridge the gap. SAMBRO implements CAP as a data standard, thus it is capable of machine to machine communication with any other system implementing CAP. The advantage provided via this platform includes the alerts issued at the central level can be received at the local level. Thus, in exercise the alerts issued by the National Warning Centers can be received National Disaster Management Organizations which can further be received by National Response Organizations. Following the alert, the National Response Organization can relay the same warning to the public with detailed descriptions of the disaster with instructions and contacts to follow-up, through various available medium like Email, SMS, RSS Feeds, FTP, Mobile Push Notification, Social Media like Facebook, Twitter and/or TV Scrolling etc. SAMBRO provides a Common Operating Picture for all the stakeholders to visualize the alerts per the risk level. A color-coded polygon where color implying the risk level associated with an area provide visual impressions to the brain.
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