Developed by Danish and Lithuanian open source specialists
Norway’s Akerhus county is sharing its early warning and crises management system. The solution is published using the Mozilla open source licence. The system is in operation in two schools, and will be implemented by other schools in Akerhus in the coming months.
The alert system can be used to warn students, teachers, school personnel and the emergency services about crisis and security situations. Options include two-way communication, surveillance video, and - for the crisis response team - maps of buildings displaying the real-time location of users of mobile devices connected to the system.
The solution combines commonly-used open source tools such as the CentOS Linux operating system, the Apache webserver and the Postgresql database management system. Additional tools, configuration and software libraries - developed by the Danish open source specialist Magenta ASP and the Lithuanian IT company Baltic Amadeus - are becoming available on Github. Components already available include VoKS-server, VoKS-desktop and VoKS-shelter. On Magenta’s Github website, there are also applications available for Android and iOS based smartphones.
The Danish open source specialist began development of the system in January, after winning Akerhus’ NKR 6 million (about EUR 680,000) public tender. Apart from making the code available as open source, Magenta is offering to assist others that are interested in using the crises management system. Options include using the solution as a cloud service.
More information:
ComputerWeekly news item (in Norwegian)
ComputerWorld news item (in Norwegian)
OSOR news item
Source code for the VoKS implementation