Web based Emergency Coordination Centre launched with Alpine Shire

The Alpine Shire Municipal Emergency Coordination Centre (MECC) is another great example of how local councils and government agencies are using Web 2.0.  Working with Alpine Shire, a rural Victorian council, Datalink have implemented a web based collaboration system which streamlines the reporting by agencies and tracking of a range of events from bushfires to road closures to major emergencies using GIS like web maps integration.

The system is being trialled amongst agencies including Alpine Health, Ambulance services, Country Fire Authority (CFA), Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE), Police, Red Cross, State Emergency Service (SES) and Telstra.

The brief to Datalink was to develop a web based system that would be extremely easy to use.

The Event Manager provides a map based view of geographical data, including pin point locations and summaries of events.  The system is built with interoperability in mind.  Managers of the system can download event lists in Excel format and use RSS feeds to syndicate to other Intranet applications as well as use the powerful super search facility. 

The MECC Dashboard gives a view of recently added events and their priority is identified using colour coded status. 

There is also individual workspace for each of the MECC agencies and a shared policies and documents section with wiki based technology enabling users to create their own pages, documents and quicklinks.

The MECC is based on Datalink's Freestyler framework, particularly, Central Portal technology and utilises the new Google Maps integration of these products, although an abstraction layer exists so it is possible to use the technology with external Geodata or Spacial Data from other GIS software such as ESRI Shapefiles, for example.

At a recent launch in Bright, the system has been well received by stakeholders and based on further feedback and consultation of users a second phase of development will add new features to the system in the near future.