Geo Huntsville

Introduction

GEO Huntsville is one of three economic development and jobs initiatives sponsored by Mayor Tommy Battle. For detailed information, see the GEO Huntsville Homepage

As part of GEO Huntsville's rapid disaster response regional pilot program called 'Blueprint for Safety', GeoQ is being leveraged as a workflow platform to enable the use of geospatial intelligence to protect the local economy and security of the citizens to remain viable during a crisis.

GeoQ and GEOHuntsville

Who are we? GEOHuntsville, is a non-profit initiative of the City of Huntsville, Alabama with over 400 volunteers in the geospatial community working in close collaboration to advance the geospatial tradecraft, bring awareness to our geospatial capabilities and attract collaborative investments in geospatial technology. In 2014, the group initiated the Blueprint for Safety pilot project to increase multi-jurisdictional information sharing and shared situational awareness among agencies and across the response spectrum in order to improve rapid disaster response. Through the development phase of the pilot, a concept emerged to help us share lessons learned, code sets, and use case documentation through a multi-city collaboration. The concept is called Exemplar City. Exemplar City encourages municipalities faced with similar challenges to collaborate in a open innovation design environment. Our collective mission is to build safe, secure, and sustainable communities.

How do we use GeoQ? We use GeoQ to enable disaster response users to 1) quickly identify impacted areas, 2) provide the ability to task and assign response resources appropriately where needed, and 3) to record and report the location, well-being and tactical actions of the responders in real time across the response spectrum.

Who is using it? Within our municipality we have created GeoQ tactical operational workspaces for essentially every agencies responding to disasters. GeoQ is design to be used in disasters but works equally well during steady state operations such as special events, maintenance routines, planning, and exercises. Agencies and departments currently using GeoQ include: Law enforcement, Fire & Rescue, Medical Services, Emergency Management, Utilities, Fleet Services, Public Works, Administrative agencies, Dispatch, Geographic Information System (GIS) services, IT Services, and others outside our municipality such as Civil Air Patrol, NGOs and volunteer organizations.

What gap does it fill? Our community is fortunate to have a very robust municipal Geographic Information System (GIS) support capability. However in addition, we have identified the need to quickly share multi-jurisdictional response information and require a sustained shared situational awareness within our response community. In order to achieve this level of awareness, we must be able to report the location and well-being of our responders as well as appropriately task and monitor their tactical actions within the response. GeoQ provides a means to manage the locations of response resources (personnel, equipment and supplies) while monitoring their well-being and proximity to hazard in real time. Our municipal GIS agency leverages GeoQ’s ability to readily take in and publish data. This provides the responder in the field access to a data rich, up-to-date backplane of local geospatial information of the highest quality.

One of the primary strengths of GeoQ is its ability to quickly break down the work into manageable pieces (Areas of Interest AOIs) and assign the work to a cadre of predefined response resources. GeoQ not only monitors the location of these resources but collects and displays the data they are tasked to collect. Features such as areas impacted, road closures, emergency ingress/egress routes as well as search and rescue operations, triage/transport areas and status. This data is then fed in real time back to the GIS department for further analytics as needed. Analytic output or any additional operational data created by the GIS department can then be passed back to the responder in the field through the GeoQ tactical workspace. Each discipline has access to the appropriate data through their GeoQ tactical workspace and users across the entire response spectrum can see the real time operational data on the map. Furthermore, GeoQ provides a constant response metric through visual analytics that allow emergency management personnel to monitor the response cadence --ensuring that appropriate resources are applied in the geographic areas where they are most needed. This helps them assess the pace to determine well in advance what is needed for successful response.

Why do we use it? GeoQ is part of an open source project initiated by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) and Mitre. NGA supports the code through their GitHub site and as such, encourages other agencies, organizations and industry to participate in the code’s development. GEOHuntsville is a partner in this Open Innovation Community actively participating in the development and advancement of GeoQ. Our project, Blueprint for Safety utilizes GeoQ’s open design and combined collaborative efforts to create features that better suit the tactical operations of our agencies --creating features and workflows that are specifically tailored to meet our local operational needs.

What can we do with it? Open source, and open design provide us flexibility to co-create with smart people we know and work with, and have proven their mettle --People working together to overcome the same challenges faced by municipalities and local governments across the country and around the world. Open source allows the community to pool resources and marshall skills needed to create and commit a specific set of features back to the core capability --Create once, use many times. This reuse and repurpose of code has proved to be very cost efficient. People can participate, contribute and benefit from anywhere at any time --allowing them to take ownership of their input and tap their ideas of how to improve the process.

We are part of an Open Innovation Community participating in open design --This open design is co-owned by its community.

What will we do next..? Thanks in part to this open source initiative, GEOHuntsville is moving forward fast to promote and extend this co-creative environment by fully operationalizing Blueprint for Safety in our community. Everyday more data is populated and more workflows are coming online. Next, we will invite other municipalities facing these same challenges to join our collaborative forum of cities --to share use cases, lessons learned, and yes, even code sets. To paraphrase Chris Anderson from his book Makers, “Open means we can collaborate regardless of geography...The Internet means we don’t have to rely on the person sitting in the next cubicle --we can find the best folks out there and tap into them...and now they can find us”.

--Together we can build safe, secure, and sustainable communities.