Press Release UNJLC

Plone helps in crisis

Plone is the new CMS under the UNJLC portal (www.unjlc.org) since end 2005. Zope Europe Association and Reflab involved in the rescue. The UNJLC website is the main repository for dissemination of logistics information from complex humanitarian emergencies.

The United Nations Joint Logistics Center (UNJLC) is an humanitarian inter-agency facility reporting to the Humanitarian Co-ordinator within complex Humanitarian crisis, and overall to the Inter-Agency Standing Committee Working Group (IASC-WG). Its mandate is to co-ordinate and optimise the logistics capabilities of humanitarian organisations in large-scale or complex emergencies¹. UNJLC is known as a common service within the United Nations Humanitarian response mechanism which operates under the custodianship of the World Food Program (WFP) who are responsible for the technical and administrative support of the unit. UNJLC is funded from voluntary contributions channelled through WFP.

UNJLC main channel for information dissemination is the web and direct emails. The website is used as a central repository of logistics data and information from the crisis region providing regular updates from the field operation. This cover humanitarian corridor accessibility and supply chain data, road and railways information, fuel availability, air operation updates and practical information on cargo and passenger procedures, customs details and procedures, contact details and regular logistical Bulletins from the field. Emails and mailling list are used to disseminate brief and information bulletin up to the field level where low bandwidth and hard communication environment di not always allow web browsing

The story

The first version of the UNJLC website was developed in Afghanistan in 2002 when the first established UNJLC was deployed. The design, interface and the concept of the website at the time was simple and basic, based on 'Flat HTML'. But with the recognition of UNJLC as a main logistic information provider within Humanitarian crisis and the rise of information to be published it soon became impossible to update the website fast enough without errors, broken links and other lost of layout.

Two years after, the UNJLC purchased a proprietary Content Management System hosted at an application service provider for its mission-critical website. This proved to be a wise choice at the time as it greatly improved the publication flow of information from the UNJLC operations. With the CMS, pages could be set up and updated within a few minutes and publication could be delegate to other UNJLC web publishers. It improved the consistency in look and feel and gave the website a search system. From the user's point of view, the advantage of the new system was a set of new functions like automatic notification on pages latest changes, an intranet and extranet access, ...

Unfortunately, this dependency became a nightmare when the provider went bankrupt and announced a closure in 3 months, due to "the hard competition of Open Source CMS's like Plone and Mambo”.

The project

The UNJLC is built to respond to crisis situations, to quickly get engaged, and to make clear decisions. The same held true for the crisis of losing their information system.

Immediately UNJLC started the rush to set up a migration project which had to be completed within this 3 months deadline. The project involved the to find funding, the selection of a new CMS, a provider, customize it to reflect its special needs and migrate everything! Naturally enough UNJLC started his search in the open source world, starting from Plone, Mambo and Drupal.
After a few weeks the choice fell on Plone, “ the leading open source content management system". The UNJLC chose ZEA for integration, as a network that includes the founders of Plone and supports the value and values of an international NGO.

Reflab acted as prime contractor of ZEA and was in charge of the customer relationship, project management and supervision of other ZEA partners involved in the project. The team, leveraging Plone and its many add-on products deployed the new site on time with all content migrated, and custom features implemented.
The migration from the closed proprietary DB (Postgres with some XML data)was performed by clever python scripting.

Eric Branckaert, responsible for the project in UNJLC, said: “With a limited budget and with such a strong time constraint, as there was no possibilities of extending our hosting and licence contract after the deadline given to us, it is amazing that we were able to manage such a migration on time. After my first visit to Pisa and after seeing the team of Reflab, I was really impressed to see such dedication on our project and understanding of the platform. After a few more stress and hosting issue, we were finally able to release the new platform and website in time. Of course we did lost some proprietary functions from the previous platform but we did gain a lot more as well as a true enthusiastic community. Thanks to the new platform, Plone, we already foresee new functions and features that we could incorporate in our website in order to offer a better service to those looking for logistic information within relief operations.”

An international team :

• Reflab (Italy, www.reflab.com) for development and deployment of the portal;
• Zettai (UK, www.zettai.com) for technical hosting;
• Zope Europe (Belgium, www.zope-europe.org)

Notes for Editors:

Zope Europe Association (ZEA) is an international network of companies involved in the development and business of Zope, Plone, and Silva. ZEA deliver content management system (CMS) deployments and manage large Zope-based projects. As a non-profit, ZEA is focused on the strength of all links in both the value chain and the "values" chain. Customers need a solid value chain of links leading back to the open source developers that create code. Agencies need a healthy "values" chain for software competitiveness and quality, leading back to the open source businesses that launch innovation.

Reflab is an Open Source Company specialized in supporting Plone and Zope technologies for medium-large deployments. From the technical design, development and consulting to traning and support. It provides the knowledge and the experience to leverage at maximum the power of these Open Source tools and improve the quality of client's software and projects.

¹ The UNJLC is deployed by the Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) when it is deemed that logistics activities will make up a significant part of an Humanitarian operation. Its role is not to carry on a programme but to co-ordinate the activities of the organisations involved, primarily with information brokerage. Decision for deployment is taken within 24 hours of the onset of a crisis, and deployment takes place within 48 hours of the decision. Staffing is primarily done through seconded staff from other humanitarian agencies within the UN system