Accomplished
Continued inquiry into firefighter-centric taskflows brought to light complexities involving additional end users, artifacts, transitions, and sequences relevant to the use of digital maps. As currently constituted, the updated scenario begins with an officer (such as a battalion chief, lieutenant, or captain) completing an inspection of a building calling out various features. Upon completion, site-specific details are submitted to a dispatch center for inclusion in a central repository. Reviewed and vetted by officers upon submission, these site-specific annotations become part of the dispatches shared with responders when an alarm call is triggered. Assembling, maintaining, and distributing these annotations touches on various task sequences and stakeholders that vary from one fire department to the next. Even more complexities arise as fire departments formalize these processes to tackle disaster planning at a larger scale, say at a manufacturing facility or chemical plant.
Challenges
The swimlane diagram pictured above posits various steps and transitions mapped to different stages/end users of a digital mapping tool like Responder Maps. Worth noting are the potential roles of specialists trained in mapping technology and dispatchers capable of manipulating visual and geodata from various sources. Many of these skills/roles involve new mapping technologies largely absent or still evolving in most organizations, resulting in a high degree of variety from one organization to the next in task and personnel assignments. Capturing and communicating a scenario that is both universal and authentic in its depiction of data-centric activities thus remains a central challenge.
Goals
One of the goals Responder Maps hopes to achieve with potential pilot partners involves convincing them of the usability of the product absent prior training in mapping technology (typical for many fire departments). By emphasizing features and elements in common with map viewing and editing tools like Google Maps and Google Earth, the resulting demo video will ideally leave the viewer with multiple ideas: that Responder Maps does not require heavy investments in training to be used effectively and can be deployed selectively and flexibly with different users to address different data-related needs.
Related articles
- Responder Maps: Week 6 (geoffnet.com)
- Responder Maps: Week 4 (geoffnet.com)
- Responder Maps: Week 3 (geoffnet.com)
