Syria is now in its fifth year of civil war. More than half the country's population has been displaced by the conflict, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates.

The IRC has been providing aid such as food and medical supplies in the area for years, but its staff and volunteers can't enter Syria to deliver the goods themselves. Instead, they depend on local Syrian organizations to pick up shipments from the border and deliver them to the hospitals and refugee camps that need them.

In order to keep track of all the aid packages flowing into the country, the IRC built its own FedEx-style package tracking system called CTS, short for Commodity Tracking System. Today the organization announced that it has open sourced the project, allowing any humanitarian organization to use CTS for free or to improve upon the software by adding new features.