Board Building Boot Camp - August 2009

Following the previous two days of WebEOC meetings it was a relief to have a group of fresh faced programmers and emergency managers from around the country attend for 2 days of administrators training and board building.

This was the first camp that we opened up to other agencies and it was great to see NZ Maritime also attend, as well as Fred Wilson from Auckland City Council who supplied his considerable expertise and experience to support us on the training.

This camp reflected the format of the previous training held last November and worked extremely effectively despite a wide range of programming ability. By the end of the two days everyone had completed a range of boards, including a very effective staff rostering board, a quarantine and incoming flight management board, and administrative changes to Maritime NZ boards.

It's clear there are some extremely competent board developers out there - the challenge now is to develop some policies around the development environment so that we can start delivering local solutions and levering national boards out of them. We also had two developers attend from the Ministry Information Directorate who have been able to gain an in-depth understanding of how the system works and hopefully in the future be able to support ongoing development.

Sincere thanks to everyone who attended and their enthusiasm over the 2 days. I'd also like to thank the Ministry of Civil Defence & Emergency Management for allowing us to utilise the National Crisis Management Centre over the 4 days of meetings and training (the National Health Coordination Centre is currently utilising the laptops and meeting room we would normally use).

Attendees view the boards that everyone had developed in a final 'show and tell'