Decisions For Heroes Blog

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