Field Operations

Recently IFAW sponsored the tenBoma project, an effort to improve reporting, tracking, and enforcement to counter wildlife crime in Kenya. Fulcrum is playing a key role on the ground to help the Kenyan Wildlife Services (KWS) catalog events associated with poaching activities. For the last several months, KWS personnel have been using Fulcrum for on-the-ground event tracking and counter-poaching investigations. During a recent trip to Voi, Kenya, near the Tsavo East National Park, I had to pleasure of working with KWS personnel and a team from Agile Analytics Group to assist in workflow development and field collection process. During the trip we refined the Service’s workflows, and how Fulcrum could better be used to support operations.

Engineering is the art of building things within constraints. Without constraints, you aren’t really doing engineering. Constraints can involve cost, time, attention, tools, or materials. Avoiding “feature creep” is crucial — it adds unnecessary complexity. Here’s an excerpt describing the challenge facing the engineer. The engineer’s task is to identify, understand, and interpret design constraints. It is usually not enough to build a technically successful product; it must also meet further requirements.

When working with our customers, we talk a lot about pain. That is, the sorts of pain your business deals with right now that we can help resolve. We make software for business productivity, so people come to us with some form of pain, hoping that we can help them get to the bottom of it and fix their problems. We focus on understanding the root pain points of business worfklow processes.

Climate change profoundly affects animal and plant communities. During periods of warming or cooling, ecosystems near the geographic edge of their range experience the impacts first. For example, the ‘islands’ of spruce-fir forests atop the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina face such early effects. These ecosystems serve as a ‘canary in a coal mine,’ offering an early indication of larger-scale changes that may follow.

Many of our customers are using Fulcrum for different types of consulting projects, meaning they’re delivering on projects on behalf of someone else — as a subcontractor to a prime contractor, to a city or municipality, or to another government agency. I wanted to take a moment to review some of the many advantages of the Fulcrum platform for consulting engineers, business analysts, field services companies, or software developers, and give a little background on why so many choose Fulcrum as a basis for completing their projects.

Recently I joined the board of the Homeowners Association in my neighborhood and discovered what many others have discovered about their HOA: a lot of frustration around management of the community and the lack of support the residents receive from the board. According to the Community Associations Institute trade association, it is estimated that HOAs govern 24.8 million American homes and 62 million residents. This leaves about twenty percent of Americans living in a community managed by an HOA.

With the ongoing widespread flooding and tornadoes affecting the southern United States, I’m compelled to write this post. It is directed towards the emergency managers and incident commanders in affected towns and counties and is meant to provide you with guidance on how to expedite disaster declaration using simple off-the-shelf technology. One of the chief goals of emergency managers should be to decrease the amount of time it takes for survivors to receive the assistance they require. This was my goal for five years while I worked for FEMA as a Geospatial Coordinator. Fulcrum will continue to offer our services to any emergency manager who needs assistance.

Guest blogger J Allard is CEO and Founder of Project 529 and a Core Team member of the Portland Police Bureau Bike Theft Task Force. This post was originally published May 18th on bikeportland.org.

Guest blogger Danny Sheehan is a geographer and data science student with the Built Environment and Health Project at Columbia University.

House of Hope story

My name is Megan Smith and I am an outreach worker with the House of Hope CDC. House Of Hope is a nonprofit that provides a spectrum of housing and supportive services to people experiencing homelessness, with the mission of preventing and ending homelessness in Rhode Island. Toward this end, my role consists of collaborating with community partners to engage individuals not well-served by the current homeless service provision system. We’re specifically focusing on those who are staying on the streets and are experiencing significant mental health and substance use challenges.

Each year, more than twenty student researchers in the MSc Engineering Geology program at the Technical University of Munich take advantage of the Fulcrum for Education program to study and map landslides in the Austrian Alps. As GPS and GIS technology replaces paper maps and handwritten notes, these students are being trained to use modern field data collection tools and techniques in their landslide mapping courses.

Historic preservation

Historic building preservation is a big deal in our cities these days. There’s an entire movement focused on the rediscovery and re-use of our urban cores. With any city of significant age, a key step to making the most out of our existing infrastructure is understanding, preserving, and in many cases reusing our historic sites in new and interesting ways.

Fulcrum’s SpatialVideo collection capability can be a valuable addition to data collection workflows, including mapping of rights-of-way, assets, pipelines, electric lines, environmental monitoring, and more.

Our latest updates include some great form validation enhancements for even better quality control over your data. These enhancements include supporting custom validation patterns for text fields by defining a regular expression (regex), as well as the ability to define min/max limits for certain field types.

A couple of weeks ago, Bryan and I were out in Flagstaff, Arizona for the annual meeting of OFWIM, the Organization of Fish and Wildlife Information Managers. Over the last several months, we’ve been doing a webinar series for OFWIM’s membership; a group which consists of technical staff, researchers, and GIS analysts working at federal, state, and local levels on issues related to fish and wildlife mapping and data management.

Before joining the Spatial Networks team, I worked for five years at FEMA as a Geospatial Coordinator. I spent my days collecting disaster-related data, analyzing it, and publishing informative maps. Senior leadership at FEMA and state governments then used these maps to support decision-making.

We’ve been hard at work the last few months creating an amazing new capability for field survey in Fulcrum using video capture, on both Android and iOS platforms, and now we’re announcing a new feature!

This is a guest post from Mitchell Sipus, interdisciplinary Community Planner specialized in designing creative solutions for the world’s most complex environments, including this project for qualititative and ethnographic research in Ethiopia.

You may have heard more about stormwater recently than you’ve ever heard about it before. Stormwater has been in the news quite a bit – particularly in the region of the Chesapeake Bay – because of tighter government regulations, new fees, and because stormwater is one of the largest sources of pollution in the Bay and its contributing waterways. Stormwater runoff picks up oils, sediment, and litter from impervious surfaces (such as parking lots) every time it rains. If this pollution isn’t captured by stormwater management infrastructure (and much of it is not) it makes its way into the Chesapeake Bay.

Keep track of changes with full version history

In addition to yesterday’s announced data management improvements with the launch of full-text data searching and filtering of content, we’ve also included another powerful capability for managing field service work: data versioning.

Previously on the blog, we’ve discussed the concept of field reports and groundtruthing on top of raster data (like satellite imagery), and the simplicity of accomplishing this in Fulcrum. Using Fulcrum’s native support for MBTiles-based map tile packs, any raster can be turned into a portable tilecache you can load onto mobile devices in Fulcrum, allowing you to annotate on top of the map using custom-designed forms.

Modern civil engineering should include technology! An increasingly rapidly changing digital world demands a furious pace of innovation in our engineering environment. SMEC, or Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation, is one of the leading engineering and development consultancies in the world. Providing multidisciplinary consulting services in engineering, project management, environmental science and development activities, SMEC has been engaged in assignments throughout the world for over 40 years.

In our previous post, we shared our experience at JIFX, the experimental event series organized several times a year by the Naval Postgraduate School at Camp Roberts, CA. JIFX provides a unique setting for field experimentation, bringing together industry, academia, and government to test and refine technologies in real-world conditions. Unlike traditional demonstrations, this event places engineers and their systems side by side, enabling direct collaboration and hands-on integration. Proving success—or uncovering failure—in this environment helps stakeholders see technologies in action while allowing engineers to push the limits of their software, hardware, or systems. As an engineer and designer of Fulcrum, participating in this kind of field experimentation is invaluable, providing firsthand insight into how the platform performs in dynamic conditions and where improvements can make it even more effective for field data collection.

We are back in the office following a great week in California for our second experience at Camp Roberts for Joint Interagency Field Exploration (JIFX). The objective of JIFX is to bring together people from industry, government, and academic institutions to field test hardware, software, and ideas to explore the potential of new capabilities in addressing various challenges. The environment is explicitly experimental, and promotes great collaboration between participants. I spent the week working closely with FEMA operations on the Disaster Recovery Center (DRC) survivor registration process, experimenting with ways to make the survivor assistance process more efficient and field-friendly, while also remaining the most helpful for stressed survivors in need. Zac and Coleman participated in various additional experiments involving Fulcrum.

This Friday, Alex and I will travel to Fort Worth, TX, for the 78th Annual NACo Conference and Exposition. We will exhibit in booth 728, so if you’re attending, make sure to stop by and visit us. As most NACo attendees know, GIS and government data collection play a crucial role in effective county operations. GIS benefits nearly every county department, from public works to elections, emergency response, and law enforcement. Leveraging powerful GIS tools improves efficiency, reduces costs, and enhances overall productivity in various government functions. Many counties already use Esri software regularly, but they could maximize their GIS capabilities even further.

Last month, FEMA Blue 1 attended a 2013 Joint Interagency Field Exercise (JIFX) hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School in Camp Roberts, California. NPS conducts a biannual RELIEF conference that fosters innovation and cooperation toward disaster response and is attended by representatives from academia; private industry; state, local, and federal government; non-profits; and international organizations.

Last week, Tony and I spent the week out at Camp Roberts in California, testing Fulcrum in the field with FEMA for disaster relief needs as part of the RELIEF field experiments.

We love hearing feedback from our users, and were very pleased to see Brandon Freeman’s excitement about Fulcrum when he reached out on Twitter. Brandon is a Civil Engineer with TREKK Design Group, and has been using Fulcrum for multiple projects.