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:

User Story 1: Setup for initial CERT training. 1a. Basic training is 8 classes and a final exam. CERT Administrator Joe creates an event for each class:

1b. Joe also creates a qualification category that requires all classes and the exam:

1c. Joe will enters (or import) a list of the students in the class. If they already exist in the volunteer database, the class is added to their existing profile. If they do not exist in the database, a new volunteer record is created.

1d. Determining which volunteers have completed all the requirements for a given qualification can be refreshed on a specified time interval or forced by selecting "Refresh Recipients" on the Qualifications page.

1e. When volunteers first complete all the required classes for Basic Training, their status is changed from "Pending" to "Active" and are eligible for additional call-outs and training.

Sample volunteer profile pages

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