Managing incident sites with software made by volunteers
Florian Wendlinger is an executive committee member and software support manager of Verein Einsatzstellenverwaltung, a not-for-profit software development organization. Its volunteers produce software for the digital coordination and documentation of emergency-service incident responses. The software is provided free of charge to government agencies and non-governmental organizations responsible for safety and security. We spoke with Florian Wendlinger about this software project
20 Feb 2020Share
You provide a software application for incident-site management free of charge. We’ll get to the ‘free of charge’ aspect shortly, but first, can you tell us what the software does?
Many incident commanders and command teams still document their crews’ response activities using pen and paper, which is manual and cumbersome. Often this documentation work is duplicated. Our software makes paper-based incident-site management and documentation redundant. The idea is that all coordination activities at the incident site should be fully digitalized and integrated. All coordination activities – that’s vehicle administration, situation reports, requests for back-up, documenting patients and injured persons, tracking consumables use, monitoring the welfare and safety of crew members wearing breathing apparatus, maintaining situation maps, coordinating rescue dogs, maintaining the incident-response logbook, and so forth.
What are the benefits of this?
Huge time savings, which frees commanders up and hence enables them to lead incident responses much more effectively. Also, the fact that all the various coordination activities are integrated within the one software platform means that data need only be entered once and are automatically shared among the different modules in the software platform. And in the case of non-emergency deployments such as demonstrations, festivals and sporting events, pre-existing information about the situation can be made available before the operation even starts.
These sorts of solutions are usually provided by companies in return for money. Why are you providing the software for free?
Being free of charge is part of the philosophy that underlies the software. Commercial software is expensive and tends to be associated with high ongoing costs in terms of license fees, update costs and so on. The problem is that many of the government agencies and NGOs responsible for safety and security can’t afford that. In many cases they are funded by public-sector bodies, such as town or city councils, which themselves often have very tight budgets to contend with. So in situations like that, extra expenditure on software is generally not an option. We believe these organizations should still have access to digital emergency-response management tools, and that is why we decided to provide our software free of charge.
How did the project come about? What were things like at the very beginning?
At the time, our fellow committee member Felix Lippold was serving with the Hamelin Volunteer Fire Brigade. He and one of his colleagues there – who has since left our project – started programming simple modules for their fire brigade. From there, the software grew and grew over time. Along the way it was made available to fire brigades in neighboring areas, and more and more socially minded people offered their help. Eventually we became an incorporated association, and today we have over 1,000 users in several countries. About 100 of those users are now paid-up members. At this point I should perhaps mention that, as a rule, the membership subscription is paid not by the member organizations themselves, but by socially minded volunteers who work for those organizations. They pay it out of their own pocket.
Who is this software for, exactly?
Our target user group comprises all government agencies and NGOs that are responsible for safety and security; in other words, fire brigades, the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW), emergency rescue services, water and mountain rescue organizations and the like. We categorically don’t target any companies that solely pursue commercial interests. Our objective with this software is to strengthen and support the not-for-profit sector.
To your knowledge are there any other software solutions that offer the same functional scope free of charge?
There are various free software products out there, but they are not comprehensive; each one only addresses a specific sub-function of incident-site management, such as situation mapping, for example. Our software, on the other hand, brings together almost all functions of incident-site management in a single system and integrates them with each other so that commanders have access to everything they need, from manpower planning to printing out the incident-response logbook, in a single platform.
Can you tell us little about the people behind the project? Are they all serving members of first-responder organizations? Or are they all IT people? Or even a mix of both?
All people on our executive committee, in development and support and in all the various other parts of our organization are themselves serving members of one or more government agencies or non-governmental organizations responsible for safety and security. Some are volunteer safety and security workers, some are professionals, and some do both volunteer and professional work. Only a very few are truly IT professionals. But that’s a good thing, because with a project as complex as ours, IT expertise on its own is not enough; you also need a range of other skills. The tasks involved are diverse, ranging from writing the manual to developing various design elements.
What are your organization’s plans for the future, and what role does INTERSCHUTZ 2020 play in them?
We are currently working on version 2.0 in order to bring our software up to date with the latest innovations in IT. The new version will be a quantum leap in terms of design and functionality. Our aim is to stage the public unveiling of version 2.0 at INTERSCHUTZ 2020. Our aim for INTERSCHUTZ is also to meet up with many of our users – they are spread far and wide across multiple German-speaking countries, so it’s great to have a central meeting hub where we can connect with them all. And, of course, we are looking forward to the opportunity to promote our software to a large number of potential new users.
You provide a software application for incident-site management free of charge. We’ll get to the ‘free of charge’ aspect shortly, but first, can you tell us what the software does?
Many incident commanders and command teams still document their crews’ response activities using pen and paper, which is manual and cumbersome. Often this documentation work is duplicated. Our software makes paper-based incident-site management and documentation redundant. The idea is that all coordination activities at the incident site should be fully digitalized and integrated. All coordination activities – that’s vehicle administration, situation reports, requests for back-up, documenting patients and injured persons, tracking consumables use, monitoring the welfare and safety of crew members wearing breathing apparatus, maintaining situation maps, coordinating rescue dogs, maintaining the incident-response logbook, and so forth.
What are the benefits of this?
Huge time savings, which frees commanders up and hence enables them to lead incident responses much more effectively. Also, the fact that all the various coordination activities are integrated within the one software platform means that data need only be entered once and are automatically shared among the different modules in the software platform. And in the case of non-emergency deployments such as demonstrations, festivals and sporting events, pre-existing information about the situation can be made available before the operation even starts.
These sorts of solutions are usually provided by companies in return for money. Why are you providing the software for free?
Being free of charge is part of the philosophy that underlies the software. Commercial software is expensive and tends to be associated with high ongoing costs in terms of license fees, update costs and so on. The problem is that many of the government agencies and NGOs responsible for safety and security can’t afford that. In many cases they are funded by public-sector bodies, such as town or city councils, which themselves often have very tight budgets to contend with. So in situations like that, extra expenditure on software is generally not an option. We believe these organizations should still have access to digital emergency-response management tools, and that is why we decided to provide our software free of charge.
How did the project come about? What were things like at the very beginning?
At the time, our fellow committee member Felix Lippold was serving with the Hamelin Volunteer Fire Brigade. He and one of his colleagues there – who has since left our project – started programming simple modules for their fire brigade. From there, the software grew and grew over time. Along the way it was made available to fire brigades in neighboring areas, and more and more socially minded people offered their help. Eventually we became an incorporated association, and today we have over 1,000 users in several countries. About 100 of those users are now paid-up members. At this point I should perhaps mention that, as a rule, the membership subscription is paid not by the member organizations themselves, but by socially minded volunteers who work for those organizations. They pay it out of their own pocket.
Who is this software for, exactly?
Our target user group comprises all government agencies and NGOs that are responsible for safety and security; in other words, fire brigades, the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW), emergency rescue services, water and mountain rescue organizations and the like. We categorically don’t target any companies that solely pursue commercial interests. Our objective with this software is to strengthen and support the not-for-profit sector.
To your knowledge are there any other software solutions that offer the same functional scope free of charge?
There are various free software products out there, but they are not comprehensive; each one only addresses a specific sub-function of incident-site management, such as situation mapping, for example. Our software, on the other hand, brings together almost all functions of incident-site management in a single system and integrates them with each other so that commanders have access to everything they need, from manpower planning to printing out the incident-response logbook, in a single platform.
Can you tell us little about the people behind the project? Are they all serving members of first-responder organizations? Or are they all IT people? Or even a mix of both?
All people on our executive committee, in development and support and in all the various other parts of our organization are themselves serving members of one or more government agencies or non-governmental organizations responsible for safety and security. Some are volunteer safety and security workers, some are professionals, and some do both volunteer and professional work. Only a very few are truly IT professionals. But that’s a good thing, because with a project as complex as ours, IT expertise on its own is not enough; you also need a range of other skills. The tasks involved are diverse, ranging from writing the manual to developing various design elements.
What are your organization’s plans for the future, and what role does INTERSCHUTZ 2020 play in them?
We are currently working on version 2.0 in order to bring our software up to date with the latest innovations in IT. The new version will be a quantum leap in terms of design and functionality. Our aim is to stage the public unveiling of version 2.0 at INTERSCHUTZ 2020. Our aim for INTERSCHUTZ is also to meet up with many of our users – they are spread far and wide across multiple German-speaking countries, so it’s great to have a central meeting hub where we can connect with them all. And, of course, we are looking forward to the opportunity to promote our software to a large number of potential new users.
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