Badges? Open Badges? What is this?

In the classic Western comedy Blazing Saddles, the Bandidos utter the famous line "Badges, we don't need no stinking badges."  So why then are we as a disaster response organization starting a badge program?

 

The answer lies in what modern open badges do.  Traditional verifications of skills have been based on formal education or on worker progress through apprenticeships in trades.  Skills learned through self-study, individual practice, and other learner based approaches were undocumented.  To some degree the explosion of certifications that started in the 1960s in the United States addressed this by creating credentials that documented competency in a wide variety of semi-professional forms of work.

 

However, these certifications mirrored the traditional academic verifications with formal structure and rigid requirements.  In our field, for example, more than one professional certification as an emergency manager specifies that the required documentation must be submitted in a three ring binder, no document protectors are allowed, and that the information must be in exactly the same order as the requirements are listed in the instructions.  That certainly demonstrates competency in preparing an application packet following highly detailed instructions in a highly bureaucratic environment, but its value in documenting the ability to save lives and protect property is open to question.

 

The wider problem is that professional certifications are heavily weighted toward activities that individuals in full time employment with a supervisor who values certification and adequate funding for travel can complete.  A requirement that a certification applicant must have attended certain professional conferences (attendance is a common "contribution to the profession") of a set number of days effectively rules out anyone who does not have employer support, and that means it rules out volunteers.

 

More dangerously, such certifications tend to substitute easily measured events for demonstrated performance of skills.  For example, attending an ungraded training course is assumed to demonstrate that you can perform to an acceptable level the skills it presents in a lecture or short activity setting.  At the same time there is a strong tendency toward traditionalism in learning - classroom courses are valued over online instruction.  And there is an inbuilt prohibition against giving credit for training received more than a certain number of years ago, in emergency management typically five years.  Finally, actually understanding what the certification represents may be difficult and represent a journey through multiple sources.

 

So we have looked carefully at the open badge movement.  First, we are a volunteer organization, so we need verification of capabilities that volunteers can do.  Second, we need portability and easy access, so that the credential and its requirements are readily available to the individual and to those who need to verify capabilities.  Third, we need to recognize the actual skills the individual can perform and the level of those skills.  We need immediacy, so that our credentials represent capabilities when they are demonstrated.  And finally, we need to understand the scope and trajectory of our volunteer's work in building skills, not just a delimited snapshot of a five year interval.  Open badges allow us to do all these things.

 

Our first step is to badge our four existing training levels because these are based on a mix of training, experience, testing, and skill demonstration and are easy to capture.  The next step will be to start to badge specific competencies needed for Internet based disaster work.

 

And if you are wondering what a badge is ...  Badges are simply electronic symbols with embedded metadata that document the achievement of competencies and provide information on who issued the badge, the requirements for its award, and the level of skill that shows.  We are using Achievery as our badging system, and recommend the use of Mozilla's Backpack as a framework for building an electronic badge resume. 

And a disclosure note - the author, Dr. Walter Green, taught for 13 years in an academic emergency management degree program, wrote his dissertation on emergency management certification, at one time held 6 national, state, and professional association emergency management certifications, and wrote the requirements package for Virginia's Professional Emergency Manager certification program when it was introduced.

Why a Micro-Nation for Disaster Testing and Training?

We have just completed the scenario handbook for a fictitious country for use in training our staff and testing our systems to ensure that we are ready to do our mission in real disasters.  It would seem that there are plenty of real high hazard areas and scenarios that we could use for this purpose.  So why did we do all the work to build a micro-nation?

 

As we looked at it, there are a number of very good reasons:

 

(1)   The Virtual Emergency Operations Center generates Tweets when we activate, change alert status, etc.  We realized that some are retweeting these as though they were real events (even though they are clearly marked Exercise).  If one goes viral, people will be asking government officials about the terrorist attack, flood, earthquake, etc.  And we will get complaints that we are creating unnecessary concerns, hurting real estate values, impacting tourism, etc.

 

(2)  All of our staff come to this work with their own experiences and built in assumptions about how emergency response works, who the resources are, etc.  Having a fictitious country allows us to build resources and design geography that requires attention to the actual details, not to assumptions.

(3)  We wanted to be able to work a wide variety of disaster scenarios, some quite rare, many geographically delimited.  With a scenario country we can design scenarios that work unusual problems that would not be found in the jurisdictions we support.

 

(4)  And we wanted to be able to test our systems with data so that we can see what the resulting displays look like, make sure we have the right options in drop-down menus, etc., not just rely on "test" as our best entry.

 

So welcome the micro-nation, the Republic of Perilo ("perilo" means danger in the constructed language Glosa).  We expect it to be a busy place.  To visit, simply become a member of our team, but remember that citizenship requires commitment to work.

 

A New Set Of Baseline Capabilities

We are in the process of rolling out a new set of forms and views for The Virtual Emergency Operations Center.   This set will be a baseline set for the services we offer supported organizations, including those we support now and new supported organizations in the future.

Why a baseline set?  And what does this mean?  Let's take the what question first.  The baseline set consists of 12 forms used to enter data online, and 12 views that display the entered data for use by organization staff to view information to alerting, task and resource tracking, planning, and reporting.  It is in effect a complete set of emergency operations center functions in one place on the Internet.  Some key facts:

• The baseline set is installed in a functional area for the organization within The Virtual Emergency Operations Center.
• Some forms generate messages that are automatically sent for notifications and warnings and reports.
• Some forms, with their associated views, serve as status boards.
• Some forms are designed for use by teams on site to report back conditions and progress.
• Access is protected by a variety of security measures to ensure that privacy is preserved.

 

The baseline set gives us a rapidly deployable and completely functional package that can be provided to supported organizations with minimum set-up, test, and training time.  Equally important is the capability that it gives us to customize to meet the needs of supported organizations.  Additional forms and views can be added easily to meet specific needs.  The order in which information is collected and the selections available through drop-don menus and check boxes can be easily customized to meet the particular operational practices of the supported organizations.  The result is the ability to deploy an easily understood and fully capable system that can be used to meet immediate needs for information management and the ability to tailor that system to the individual needs of a supported organization.

Why Exercises?

Why do we do exercises?  For that matter, what is an exercise?  Let's take the second question first.

Exercises are simulations, in our case of disaster events.  Generally they are conducted to:

(1) train and/or evaluate staff in the performance of their emergency jobs under realistic conditions,

(2) test equipment  in the roles in which it will be used - including hardware and software, and

(3) test plans and procedures for emergency response.

Testing in this context implies both evaluating whether or not something works and identifying ways in which performance can be improved.  Although there is a theoretical difference between training and testing, most exercises that we do serve for both training and testing.

Our exercises can be internal or external.  Internal exercises involve only our staff and the Virtual Emergency Operations Center.  External exercises involve and are conducted by other organizations that we support.

There are five commonly accepted types of exercises.  Two of these, orientations and tabletop exercises, are not really applicable to our virtual environment.  We do conduct and participate in:

(1) drills - these focus on specific subsystems, functions, or procedures within the Virtual Emergency Operations Center and may be done with limited staffing. 

(2) functional exercises - these involve most or all functions and systems of the virtual Emergency Operations Center and exercise a complete staff.

(3) full scale exercises - these normally involve the full system including the movement of resources and the performance of simulated on scene hands-on tasks.  For us, external exercises, even if they are functional for the agency conducting them, are full scale exercises for us.

So why do we do exercises?  There are three key reasons.  First, we use them to train new members on the actual job they will be doing when we are activated.  Our operations are complex, and for someone who has never been through an event they can seem difficult to perform.  Training takes away the newness and makes the unfamiliar familiar.

Second, we use them to maintain proficiency.  Experience shows us that if you do not regularly operate our systems you play catch-up during the first part of your duty shift in a major exercise or disaster.  And playing catch-up is stressful, causes errors, and results in slow and inefficient work.  That is why we run at least one drill or functional exercise each month.

Third, we are constantly modifying our software, checklists, job aids, and emergency operations plans to reflect new capabilities, new taskings, and lessons learned from previous events.  Testing these in drills and functional exercises are the only way we can be sure that they will work when we need them.

Finally, as a virtual organization, the only time we regularly "see" our members is in exercises or actual disasters.  Exercises help us get to know each other, see what each of us can do well, and build the teamwork and shared confidence needed when the water is rising, the wind is blowing, and other organizations need our help.

Communications Watch?

We have an alert state for The Virtual Emergency Operations Center (TVEOC) called "Communications Watch."  So, what does that mean, and why do we do it?

Alert states in an emergency operations center are a way to manage staffing and functions throughout the life cycle of a specific disaster.  Obviously, when the earliest hints that a disaster might occur appear, we do not need every member on duty and a full Incident Command System staff running.  On the other hand, we definitely do need more people and more functions when the crisis is on us.  Alert states give us clear guidelines for people and actions for a developing event so that we can provide effective support to other organizations.  And they allow us to increase both in an orderly way as the situation deteriorates.

On a day-to-day basis we operate routine operations in a Released alert state.  This means we have a Watch Officer on duty, and we check our systems on a regular basis to ensure they are functioning correctly.  The Watch Officer maintains situation awareness, monitoring a variety of sources to determine if there is a potential threat in an area where we provide support to one or more organizations.

 

When a threat starts to develop, or when governmental emergency management systems start to increase their alert levels, we need to increase the level of preparedness for action by monitoring the TVEOC communications links and our information sources more frequently.  At the same time we need to give the membership an alert that activation may be required for an imminent event, and develop initial plans and briefings for response.  Hence we declare a Communications Watch.  

 

A Communications Watch differs from the Warning Orders our Watch Officers send out to alert the members to potential threats.  A Warning Order is a heads up that something may happen with no action required other than increasing personal situation awareness (although we may send one as the first alert in a rapidly developing situation).  A Communications Watch is a set of actions by the staff on duty and by individual members to increase our ability to respond to an event that we can identify as having an imminent requirement for us to initiate operations. 

 

So read your Communications Watch checklist, and the next time a Communications Watch is declared be ready to take the actions it specifies.

It Is Checklist Time Again

We routinely revise our operational checklists when there are changes to how The Virtual Emergency Operations Center operates or to our operational procedures.  Why bother?  After all, with apologies to the bandidos in the classic Western comedy Blazing Saddles, "Checklists, we don't need no stinking Checklists!"

But the reality is that we actually do need checklists.  Operations under the pressure of disaster conditions must be high reliability.  Lost information, bad choices, or befuddled process all have real consequences in delayed or just plain wrong responses to immediate needs.  Regardless of your level of experience, the pressure of the event and the complexity of response will cause you to miss obvious steps if all you have to rely on is your memory of how to do it right.

This is a lesson people who do things that require high reliability have learned.  Pilots, ranging from private pilots to pilots who fly commercial and military aircraft, have checklists to follow for every stage of flight.  Military command center staffs and missile launch crews have checklists to make sure that they can quickly do their jobs in a crisis.  Increasingly medical facilities use checklists for procedures that have a high potential for bad outcomes if the right steps in treatment are not taken in the right order.  The list of checklist users is endless.

Operating an online emergency operations center supporting several organizations is a complex task.  When we operate with only a watch officer the job is single track, but still complex with many tasks to be done and an optimal order in which to do them.  In a big event, with multiple staff members on duty, the checklists help ensure not only that all tasks are completed, but also that they are coordinated between the staff members.

We just completed revision of our online checklists to the new 5 October 2014 edition.  It was time well spent to ensure that we can do the best possible job of supporting other voluntary organizations with effective disaster information management.   

Preparathon Report and Feedback

In September we participated in the National Preparedness Month sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.  Our reply to a request for information on activities conducted posted in the National Preparedness Community is pasted in below:

The Legion of Frontiersmen in the United States is a small, all-volunteer disaster response organization that provides information management services to voluntary organizations through our online facility, The Virtual Emergency Operations Center.  The National Preparathon Month was an excellent opportunity for us to test our readiness with two exercises.  On 5-7 September we ran a combined United States and Canada alerting exercise with a 3 day major earthquake scenario long the US-Canada border for our members and for our Canadian counterparts.  This gave us good baseline data on availability of people (66% of the membership) and on electronic alerting (over 50% alerted in 8 hours from the east to west coasts).  On the Day of Action on 30 September we ran a winter storm scenario to test a new micro-volunteering portal we have installed to allow short term volunteers to provide us warning data on developing events.  We identified some minor technical fixes to our system, took our alert status from Released through Communications Watch in under one hour, and established a format for recognizing and providing feedback to volunteers who provide us early warning data.  We are using the lessons from these  two exercises to prepare for our exercises in October on the 18th as part of the Great ShakeOut and the 25th for USA Weekend's Make a Difference Day.

The feedback from the National Preparedness Community Manager who requested the information on Preparathon activities was:

You guys got a lot of really great experience last month! Glad to hear that you were able to activate your volunteer base and take the lessons learned and apply them to the Great Shakeout. Wow! Great work. Thanks for sharing.

Current Disaster Exercise Schedule

Internal disaster exercises currently scheduled are:

18 October 2014 in conjunction with the Great ShakeOut - test of ability to rapidly go from Released status to full Activation in response to an earthquake event.

25 October 2014 in conjunction with the USA Weekend Make A Difference Day - test procedures for staff scheduling in a disaster.