bonus- final project

For this bonus blog I have chosen to speak to you all about our final project for our Security and Risk Analysis Crisis Informatics class. For this project, our assignment was to invent a piece of software, hardware, or a device that would help in emergency response in one-way or another. After some though our group has chosen to make somewhat of a check in system. Basically the design is made up of software data that incorporates a mapping-overlay technology used for sharing information. We are going to use a type of software that allows multiple devises that will upload or update useful information into the software. It’s going to allow you to overlay many types of information, at the same time it will allow you to choose specific information you want to view. It’s an organized way to rapidly find the information you need. The idea is to minimize information overload for humanitarian organization, reduce duplicated information, and solve any communication issues between the organizations involved. The benefit of this is to make it easier for the humanitarian workers to find the information that they want and or need and to get it fresh from the source and faster then ever before. The types of information that will be readily available for the users are locations of colleagues, what they are doing, and how far away they are. The basic use of this would be for law enforcement officers. The way I describe it is if a police officer is at a call at a certain address for lets just say a domestic disturbance, and he is alone. If things start to get a little sticky, he will be able to look up where his nearest back up is, how long it will take them to get there, and what they are doing. This is a great tool to have because it brings awareness to the officers and gives them a sense of partnership with their fellow officers. Because at every given moment, everyone will be able to know exactly what everyone else is doing and there will be no questions. However, just because I used the police as an example, it is no by means limited to them. It could be used by the military, emergency management, humanitarians, non-government organizations, firemen, Emergency medical technicians, and others. So basically there is no limit to who can use this software. The reason that we decided to create this software, is because when we had guest speakers, we would always ask them what they wanted to improve disaster response, and a common answer between most of them was that they would like a check in system. This is because they had a hard time knowing who was at the scene and what they were doing. So with us creating this software, I believe that it would fix this problem and even go above and beyond the call of duty. I truly believe that this will be successful and will be able to be used by many different organizations.