eOneOne.net is Live!

http://eoneone.net/ is now online. Please register and share with your friends and family encouraging them to register. Thanks. Jim

From ashes come lessons learned

Tuesday, September 21, 2009, marked a crazy day in southern Oregon. A Hot, Dry, Windy day turned a fire into a potential threat to our entire city. You will have to read elsewhere about the exact details of the fire and that a subsequent fire (much larger) burned in Medford that same day as well.

That night with both fires "contained" (or were they?) I could not sleep because I kept going over the communications I had with several people affected and not affected but concerned all day.

I remembered how I took photos and videos and posted them to facebook instantly from my cell phone. I remember going home and telling my wife that a fire might come toward us if the high winds kept blowing (thankfully they shifted direction) and that we had to calmly start an evacuation of all of our animals (Horses, Cows, Donkeys, Cats, Dogs, Parrot). We even tried to think about the fire impact to our ducks. (Ok I did, she just smiled at me)

When we realized that we would not be directly in danger she started calling people that might need our help evacuating their animals and I drove in to town to see what was going on and was shocked to see how big this fire had gotten.

I went online and started looking for details. I found out that the elementary school was being evacuated, so I copy and pasted that on my facebook and people online really started to get involved.

The realization that a fire might spread into town became everyones concern. People frantically were looking for details.

I shared anything that I found as soon as I found it and it created even more sharing. We found twitter feeds and shared those. We found photos and shared those. We found official words on the city website and shared those.

People then started posting that social networks were invaluable in a situation like this.

But it took work. I was spending time searching and posting.

And then it was over. (Super big thanks to the heroes on the front lines that fight fires and to everyone that helped or tried to help others)

And when it ended I thought. I thought and thought about what needed to happen next time to make it easier and better for all the concerned citizens and friends of our community to communicate in an emergency. Any community in crisis has this issue.

I thought about how the flow of communication works in this day and age.

What makes this unique is that the city, school district, county and hospital all use my companies technology for managing thier websites. Site in a Box. and as a subscriber to each of those sites I can receive important news from them after they post it (that evening), or I can receive urgent emails from them if they broadcast it or I can visit the site on my own and see that important information has been posted.

But I wanted more. I wanted to be told by all of those sites of any emergency information in my email and on my cell phone as they updated it.So I pitched it to my team the next day and we developed the eOneOne system.

It's a simple system (experimental) that you can register once on to receive automated updates when the next emergency occurs and an alert is posted to the site. We will also develop hooks to Twitter, Facebook, Flikr and Youtube to show anything posted related to the emergency.


What makes this unique?

1. You visit one site to register for all emergency alerts from the city, county, hospital and school district. (because the city of Medford also uses our technology you can subscribe that as well and visa versa.

2. If an emergency alert is posted on the site you will receive an email and SMS message to that fact ASAP.

How is this different from site subscription?

You can still subscribe to each site but that is for normal communication. eOneOne will really only work in an emergency situation.

We still have work to do, but we have the subscribe page working. I'll post the URL to it soon. I hope that it will go live tomorrow.

We still need to make the alert tool talk to the eOneOne system and I need to get communication details from other community emergency partners like CERT and the local news agencies.

Will you be spammed or sent any other info if you register? NO.

I will not share your data with anyone or use it except in emergencies and tests of the emergency system, as you would expect.

You can also unsubscribe at any time.

You should register. You should get everyone in your family to register if they have a cell phone or seperate email and you should tell all your friends to subscribe.

Please let me know what you think. I plan to add more and more functionality to it and to use our community as a test bed and see where it grows from there.