eoconline/opla

Sample Site for an EOC organized into standard Sections: Operations, Planning, Logistics, Admin (OPLA)

opla's Issues

FRC: Create a Model Site to Replicate

What is the 20% functionality that 80% of Emergency Operations Centers need? Where can we get our largest bang for the limited time we have to invest?!

Our Roadmap needs your input to rank what Key Features we work on! Hopefully we can use native GitHub functionality to create a list of possible features, and allow EOC staff and volunteers from across the country to suggest new features and vote which are most crucial.

Having a prototype up and running is a valuable way to demonstrate ideas and gain participation from visually oriented folk.

So what might be in the initial site, until we can work out the Roadmap bit?
Ideas:

• Incident Action Plan (IAP) Builder: Linking Objectives to Strategies, Tasks & Missions; Matching materiel & human resources to tasks/missions; Reporting back on real-time progress of the tasks.
• Call & Incident Log - recording/prioritizing/tracking incoming information & requests & responses
• Planning Clock/Battle Rhythm/Meeting Schedule
• Situation Analysis and Awareness: analyzing Essential Elements of Information, Critical Infrastructure/Locations, monitor outside broadcast & social media
• Logistics: Typing and requesting & tracking Resource Requests at a local level and at upstream/downstream organizations
• Admin & Finance: Business rules, Financial Burn Rates,
• Exercise & Training Planning & Calendars
• Staff & volunteer training, credentialing & scheduling for Operational Periods, quota & time sheet reporting; overtime warnings

Please add your comments in the comments below!

RFC: Clarify our dependency on DNN

Using DNN as our base Content Management System (CMS) brings much to the table:

Low-Cost, Open Source

• Free, open-source"Community" edition available: https://github.com/dnnsoftware/Dnn.Platform
  Powerful Features
• Lightweight enough to run on a laptop (if isolated by a hurricane/earthquake), but sophisticated enough to run in the cloud on Azure, AWS, or in your agency's large load-balanced server farm.
• Advanced administration tools and options
• Extensive documentation: www.dnnsoftware.com/docs

Great User Experience

• Easy to combine public facing sites with departmental and governmental level content
• Simple Site Editing User Experience
• Trivial to reorganize/reflow content on pages and throughout the site
• Flexible site structure
• Extensive store of free and paid modules to customize & extend a site's functionality
• Custom styling through skins which support HTML 5, CSS 3, responsive design, Material Design, Bootstrap, jQuery and most other UI tool sets
• ¿Habla Espanol? Parlez vous Francais? Multi-lingual sites are easy.

Secure

• Sophisticated Role Based Security
• Easily edited/extended user registration database
• Strong security team reacts quickly to new, incoming threats
• Leverages Microsoft's security features

Vital EcoSystem

• Most popular Content Management System (CMS) in the .NET universe: used by ~1 million sites worldwide
• Mature product with a vital user community
• Corporate backed professional versions with robust support
• In use by hundreds of thousands of major corporations, government agencies, universities, businesses, non-profits and individuals

Proven Architecture

• Nice Client-Server Architecture that allows a custom mix of powerful server-side functionality with responsive, nimble client side display and user interaction
• System built on interchangeable providers: database, file system, friendly URL, caching, logging, authentication, HTML editor, admin interface, etc.
• Modular authentication system: Native or Facebook, Active Directory, Google, etc.
• Extensible functionality through modules that can use MVC, Razor, Angular, React, .NET Core, and many JS Client libraries

and

• I know it!

There are some limitations inherent with adopting DNN:

• It is currently Windows-centric, though in a few years should move to .NET Core allowing future provisioning on Apple & Linux
• The UI is still heavily reliant on legacy WebForms.
• While not a huge profit center, DNNSoftware has sound financial footing.

Anyway, the real point of this issue is to encourage commentary on how best to abstract the services/functionality we rely on from DNN, and have an architecture that doesn't rely on any particular CMS.

A simple strategy for now is to minimize reliance on any particular CMS, and build an indirection layer from the start to insulate us from any future change in CMS. Ideally we'd be able to support other CMS's in the future, or roll our own, but DNN & Microsoft look like great partners!

Feel free to comment on alternative stacks, providers or CMS's we might look at early on - if they might offer anything like the list of advantages above.

Allow Initial Working Sites to be Easily Created

The goal is to easily set up a 'model' site for new users to experience/test/demo/use as a starting point for their own site customizations. (It likely will help with testing and other purposes too.)

At one level we can just set up a (Docker?) container and replicate that.

At a more primitive level, we need a smooth process to create such a container to begin with and incorporate updated components, whether a new DNN Release, or some other library we use. This would be used by those staying off the cloud too.

Components of our sample site likely include:

• DNN.Platform
• One or more custom skin(s), if we decide to supplement the DNN default skins
• Custom modules deemed critical enough (e.g., ICS Forms?) to be part of the base product (optional modules get installed my the user later)
• A basic set of pages (in a tree structure)
• Initial content for those pages: modules with usage & customization guidance
• Documentation

For the cloud, there are issues of provisioning to get worked out:

• Easy account establishment
• Free trial period to streamline on-boarding
• Guidance for Live/Staging/Last-Known-Good App Service Instances
• Guidance for Backup/restore

One strategy to investigate is how to take advantage of the existing DNN Import/Export functionality. These overlap/interact with the DNN Site/Page Template functionality. Some issues they have may need resolution/work-around/understanding of first:
dnnsoftware/Dnn.Platform#2432