At RHoK 2010, Sahana programmers first worked with the Chicago Community Emergency Response Team to create a volunteer tracking system that can be used for Chicago CERT and, eventually, more of the 1800+ CERTs in the United States.

The notes from RHoK 2010 can be at http://eden.sahanafoundation.org/wiki/BluePrintCERT. The relevant portions for our goals this year are copied into the notes below. It is important to understand that many CERT member and administrators are not strongly technical and are intimidated by the power and complexity of the existing platform.

There are three specific functionalities we hope to accomplish at this year's event:

• Create a simple, easy-to-follow, intuitive Volunteer and Event database user interface.
• Create a search functionality that allows administrators to search for volunteers with specific characteristics and choose to send event deployment requests to those volunteers.
• Automatically process volunteer responses to the deployment information, respond appropriately to the responses, and generate a master list of participating volunteers for the event.

Create a simple, easy-to-follow, intuitive Volunteer and Event database user interface

The following screenshot is a proposed UI design that should be simple and unintuitive enough for non-technical users to be able to follow:

Create a search functionality that allows administrators to search for volunteers with specific characteristics and choose to send event deployment requests to those volunteers

Automatically process volunteer responses to the deployment information, respond appropriately to the responses, and generate a master list of participating volunteers for the event