Decisions For Heroes Blog

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Remember I hinted at a hidden feature? Did you find it? Well, if you had tried ‘Decisions For Heroes’ on your mobile last week, you would have found ‘D4H mobile’. It will work on any mobile phone with a web/internet/WAP browser (nothing modern required), in any country. Just visit your normal D4H address (e.g. http://yourteamname.d4h.org) on your phone - you’ll be asked to sign-in as usual.

‘D4H mobile’ is a stripped down version of the app, with just the right amount of information you need.

• Check your on-call status.
• Mark yourself off-call.
• Mark yourself back on-call in real-time.
• Check your team status, find out how many are available.
• Get alerted if any requirements have been broken.
• See who is away, and when they’re back.
• See how many of each qualification or group you have available.
• Find out what activities are happening ‘now’ or ‘next’.
• See what you missed, which activities were you absent for?
• Read your whiteboard.
• Write notes on the whiteboard.
• Confirm your attendance for an activity.

Wow!

Feedback from different phones greatly appreciated!

DUBLIN, IRELAND - The ‘Improve It’ section of the site asked for some whiteboard enhancements. They’re here!

No complex date fields! When we write notices, our minds work in ‘days from now’, not end dates. Solved!

You can now permanently delete ‘cleared’ notes, and the ability to duplicate a used note with the ‘use as template’ button. Sorted!

Every week we make this simplier!

DUBLIN, IRELAND - The best ideas come from you! While demoing the new ‘confirm attendance‘ feature to a rescue team, they asked why the dashboard didn’t prompt them if they hadn’t confirmed yet. It seemed obvious!

So from today, if you have not yet confirmed your attendance, and the activity is this week, or next, you’ll get a nice message reminding you. Excellent suggestion!

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Not sure who’s going to show for your training session? From today, when you request someone to attend an event, their attendance is put as ‘unconfirmed’. We show it as a question mark ‘ ? ‘ rather than a tick.

If the member wishes to confirm, they can click [Yes] or [No] on the activity page. This will give you an idea of who is coming on the day.

Note: Once the activity has started the list is locked, and any changes to attendance by an editor will be taken as ‘confirmed’ changes rather than ‘unconfirmed’. This is because once the activity has started we expect you to know who turned up or who didn’t.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Everyone’s an individual, or at least their attendance now is! A new ‘durations’ column has arrived on the [Update Attendance] page. Red text means it’s hours they were absent, green text is hours added to their logs for that activity, blank suggests they were not expected anyway.

When might you use this?

• An incident lasts 5 days but half the searchers only did 2 hours a day each. That’s 5×2hrs not 5×24hrs.
• You go away for a weekend as a team, but someone only turns up for one day, they get 8hrs instead of 48hrs.
• A team member is absent from a 5hrs training exercise. You only needed them there at the start anyway so you reduce the absent duration to 2hrs.

To treat everyone as an individual just roll over their duration hours and [click!], now their hours are editable… when you’re done, just [Save Changes] at the bottom as normal.

Note 1: If you go back and [update details] of the activity and adjust the start-end times, we’ll update all the attendance hours automatically, but only for those who’s hours were already the same as the duration of the activity. If you’ve already manually entered hours and you were wrong, you’ll need to update them all individually.

Note 2: If you’ve got dogs or horses on your team, currently they inherit the full event hours start-end like us humans used to. Once we’ve enough momentum in this area, we’ll make them individuals too!

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Release #364 (8th December 2009) has lots and lots of updates we’ve been working hard away on. If anything doesn’t work on your system, drop a note in the ‘improve it’ section.

New Flash Charts

All the charts on the site are now powered by Open Flash Chart 2. This update allows us to begin to move over to SSL security for your data as we’re generating them on our server - not on Google’s. All charts now have roll-over legends too.

Menu Tidy Up

We’ve begun to consolidate menus into simpler to understand layouts. Part of this was to merge [Comms] in under members as [Messages]. [Analytics] [Maps] is now under [Analytics] [Charts] -> ‘Heatmaps’. [Analytics] [Casualties] is now under [Activities] [Incidents] -> ‘All Casualties’. [Activities] [Agenda] is now under [Activities] [Calendar] -> ‘Agenda’. More menu changes will happen in the near future, it’s part of the plan to make the site more intuative as we add new features. Our mantra is “if you can’t control this site with an iPod dial, we’re too complicated”. We’re trying!

PDF Printing/Exports

We have a swish new printing option that allows you to create PDF reports from your data. This is ultra cool. Print calendars, phone lists (note: you only see the personal details shared with you), pocket mobile number guides, the whiteboard, etc. You can print off individual exercise/incident/event reports too. If you want a custom form replicated for your organisation, email me (robin at bytesurgery dot com).

Team Monthly and Annual Reports

A new menu option in [Analytics] is [Reports]. In here you’ll find the annual and monthly reports we’ve written for your team. We trend all your data to give you a nice report you can print out and hang on your base wall. We’re all about getting your data out of D4H again but with some magic value added.

More Numbers for Admins

Previously, we kept all personal charts ‘relative’. We never told you the exact number of activities someone had been on when comparing them to one another - we felt it might drive too much inter-team competition. Well, we’re sticking with that ethos for ‘Members’ but still giving all the information to ‘Member+’, ‘Editors’, and ‘Owner’ levels. Those guys now see the numbers too - enjoy the data!

Right Click Calendar

Jump into [Activities] [Calendar] and you can now right-click the blank area beneath a day number to quick-add an activity, or off-call period, to that date!

Forward & Back Calendar

Sick of picking dates from drop down fields? So were we! You can now jump forward or back a day, month or year in the calendar views.

Hidden Feature

If all has gone to plan, we’ll announce this killer feature this week. It’s already there - the question is, can you find it!? Hint - you’ll need small fingers.

Others

Whiteboard now has no end time, just a date. It ends at 23:59 in your timezone on the day you choose.

Export sidebars are neater, you should only see the export types you’re permissioned to.

Who is the finest of them all?

While undertaking some research on Google Trends to see how rescue, the news, and the internet are playing out, I noticed some interesting data while looking at the United Kingdom data. The following top chart shows the Google search trends for rescue services while the bottom shows the mentions in the news. It’s clear that the RNLI are winning in the search for info league, but the coast guard are winning the ‘mentions’ in the news. This is probably not a fair when you scale the two organisations against each other. What is interesting, is that Mountain Rescue get as many news mentions as the RNLI with real activity (and maybe better press liaisons) happening in 2007 onwards.

The part I wanted to see was this… the news references of “Rescue” and as you can see - we’re in a growing market.

Working with rescue teams around the world, we get sent some incredible photos of heroic rescue situations. As heroic as they may be, none stopped us in our tracks like D4H users in San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office Cliff-Dive-Marine Unit who sent over photos of “SPARROW-1″, their electric response vehicle!

Based near San Francisco, their ‘piece de resistance’ the Sparrow electric car was donated to the team. They repainted it, put a light bar and siren on it, and even fitted it out with a two way radio!

Powered by 13 x 80 amp 12 volt batteries on essentially a golf cart chassis it can get up to 100Km/hour. There are about 30 left in the world and now mainly used by the team for parades.

Brilliant!

(Images owned by and used with permission from San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office Cliff-Dive-Marine Unit)

Did you know I write a daily blog about the development of Decisions For Heroes from idea to business?

Come and join in the commercial, branding, product discussion on our parent company ByteSurgery’s blog. Today we’re looking at the logo choices for D4H.

The O’Reilly Radar is the equivilent to the New York Times of technology. A highly respected technology news web site that has featured Decisions For Heroes on their homepage for the weekend. This is awesome, here are some quotes from their “Master Of Disaster” Jesse Robbins who is a volunteer Firefighter/EMT & Emergency Manager, and led a task force deployed in Operation Hurricane Katrina. Jesse writes about Infrastructure, Emergency Management, and technology that helps people be safe, happy, and free.

One of the most interesting DisasterTech projects I’ve been following is “Decisions for Heroes” led by developer and Irish Coast Guard volunteer Robin Blandford.

Decisions is like Basecamp for volunteer Search & Rescue teams. The focus is on providing “just enough” process to compliment the real-world workflow of a rescue team, without unnecessary complexity.

This is the winning approach for building systems that “serve those that serve others”, and is echoed by InSTEDD’s design philosophy and the Sahana disaster management system.

Over time this kind of data could be analyzed in aggregate across multiple teams and regions and create an incredibly powerful resource for Emergency Managers.

The system tracks certification expiration dates and prompts team members & leaders to plan classes and remain current. This is a huge issue for volunteers who have to manage professional-level training requirements with the demands of a regular career.

This is an innovative project with tremendous potential, and hopefully an early signal of coming changes in Emergency Management.

You can read the full article here!

More on our parent site, ByteSurgery.com