Tim Keller

I’ve been rather quiet of late – here’s why: Our team at Umoya have been hard at work on supplying our uniti app to the National Disaster Management Centre for 2010.

In September 2009, we starting building Umoya’s next software platform using staffroom (our school management app) as a base. We distilled the framework down to its core, and called it the ChirpFramework (a reference to staffroom’s original name – ChirpSchool). We chose PHP on the front-end so that our developers could rapidly deploy new features, and MySQL on the backend as we understand its performance characteristics in staffroom. In between, we have some bits holding things together.

Since November we’ve been actively developing uniti – our unified collaboration app for business and government. Here’s some more about it:

DISASTER management centres around the country will use software developed for the World Cup to coordinate a multi-disciplinary, multi-sectoral approach to expected xenophobic attacks and their consequences.

The need to manage the risk of disasters during the World Cup prompted the Western Cape Disaster Management Centre to ask Cape Town ICT company, Umoya (www.umoya.net), to devise a web-based platform that has since streamlined emergency communications country-wide.

Known as “uniti”, the software helped more than 350 disaster management workers, including command and control centres, to share real-time information that provided up-to-the minute readiness to deal with any eventuality during the World Cup said Peter Beretta of Umoya.

“The National Disaster Management Centre has procured the program for operations in all provinces, where it is being used by Disaster Management themselves, as well as elements from the police, Red Cross and other government entities,” said Beretta

Jackson Rikhotso, Western Cape provincial deputy director responsible for disaster preparedness, said the “uniti” software “helps us to get accurate information for proper decision making”.

“It contributed to the smooth running of the World Cup,” said Rikhotso.

Hailing Uniti as a “major milestone”, Mlungisi Gongqa from the national Disaster Management Centre in Pretoria said: “For the first time in the history of national disaster management we are able to network with everybody across the country, and improve response time.

“We can report and analyse situations more quickly.”

Gongqa said on Friday: “We are already plugged into Uniti in all the provinces so it will be easy for picking up xenophobic incidents as they arise from municipality to municipality and from province to province.

“We will use Uniti to log in every incident of xenophobia, and will follow up on every one of them, no matter how small.”

Andre Harrison, also of Umoya, said: “Although Uniti was developed for the World Cup, it has legs beyond that. To help the country cope with attacks and their consequences, the system can be developed further to make it more specific for the needs that arise out of the displacement of people. As these events occur, the software is able to develop in synch with what is happening.”

Beretta said Uniti facilitated communication between line functions like police, ambulance and fire services, and was already being used by some district and local municipalities, including the City of Cape Town.

The management of refugee camps was being developed to link all the camps and their managers, who could communicate with each other easily and quickly.

“Camps that have the Uniti software will, because of their integrated communication, be able to register the refugees in and out of camps, keep full biographical details of displaced persons, and provide accreditation details of NGOs, social workers and people working in the camps.

“The software also facilitates the transferring of people between camps. It is able to link family members in different camps. Part of the software is a web presence that allows details of missing persons to be published on the website.

uniti’s core is the thousands of contacts it provides of individuals in all areas able to respond when disaster threatens.

“A centralised address book of all relevant disaster management, police, emergency services, defence force and fire department staff makes it possible to reach the relevant person when necessary,” Beretta said.

“Your data base gives you the name of the relevant individuals, contact details and photographs of each. All you need do is click on ‘call’,  and the program dials your landline or cell phone while calling the other person.”

The “uniti” system includes the ability to listen in on or join two-way radio talk groups, voice recording, situation report logs, a forum for text conversations, and a web intranet facility for posting alerts, updates and images. It also plots the recorded incidents using Google Maps.

“It is already being used daily for communication between Disaster Management and emergency services. The program allows everyone to know when and where anything is happening. We get several hundred entries a day from users.

“We have designed it so that it is mobile. You can access it from your cell phone or a laptop and it is rapidly-deployable anywhere because it is a hosted application and only requires access to the internet.”

It takes two hours to train someone to use the system, he said.

Hello hello!

So here’s something worth admitting: I’ve been running Wordpress 2.0 since 2006 and have never once bothered to upgrade to the latest version – unlike Jonathan who seems to update to the current stable almost daily! So without further ado, let me welcome you to the new Wordpress2.5′d timokeller.net 2.0. I designed this rather simple theme to run on the effortlessly awesome K2 theme for wordpress, and I think its come out okay. Suggestions?

Congrats to the Wordpress guys on a stunning new WP-ADMIN panel and the already huge number of downloads they have received. Its funny how even though its just a blogging script, it gets much more attention than Drupal releasing 6.1!

I’ve spent most of the past four months working on ChirpFX, a simple MVC Framework for developing human-centric web applications in PHP 5. The first application to use the framework is ChirpSchool – a highly extensible webapp for school and student management, assessment, promotion and monitoring. Its been picked up by the likes of Sun Valley Primary School and other local schools, and we’re looking forward to expanding at a rather exciting pace. We’ll have a promo website up soon with more information. More on that in the coming weeks.

If you want to keep an eye on me, follow me on Twitter. If you’re not on Twitter yet I’d highly suggest you join – its a really interesting way to interact with friends and followers!

Schedule for the next few weeks:

• Cognitive Behaviour Analysis Tutorial Assignment and Project
• Computer Science Network Architecture Tutorial 2 and Test
• Professional Communication Unit Paper due
• Deliver SMS and Assessment Modules of ChirpSchool
• See lots of Amy!

Thanks for catching up! See you on Twitter.

Tim