RE: Welcome!

Hi Renato,

Thanks for the welcome. I'm an Australian Fire Services Regional Officer
(ret), member of the Sahana Board of Directors and have joined this
initiative as a current representative of the mining, industrial emergency
response and mines rescue sectors. I also hope to leverage the expertise of
my industry in this initiative. 

My motivation is similar to those expressed by others - During 1982 I
commenced development of the EMS Emergency application (the Emergency
Management System); a system that evolved to become a suite of software
application modules for the management of disaster volunteers, finances,
operations (alerts, dispatch and ICS), planning, pre-planning and logistics.
EMS was widely used in Australia until 1998 when it was broadly replaced by
proprietary in-house disaster software systems.

That it was replaced was a blessing (to me!) as the sector had demonstrably
evolved to a point where it desired improvement to information and
communications management. Unfortunately a down-side was the rapid
development of proprietary systems and promotion of various newly adopted
standards; few of which were compatible with each other. Hence my current
involvement with Sahana and desire to promote the value of standards that
meet and exceed the objectives of humanitarian-based disaster response,
mitigation and recovery.  

Kind regards,

Don Cameron
Xstrata (www.xstrata.com)
+61 2 63725314