Alright. Well, thanks everyone for joining us today to to learn about streamlining elections management with WebEOC.

My name is Matt Cronin.

Yesterday, I actually celebrated thirteen years with Jabari, and prior to that, I, used WebEOC, my county emergency management agency for three years.

And I’m excited to be here today with Donnie Reese, battalion chief and WebEOC administrator for Atlanta Fulton County Emergency Management.

Donnie brings over fifteen years of experience with the agency and, actually, emergency management prior to that, and has partnered with Jabari to build a solution that we’re gonna showcase today, really drawing on many years of lessons learned, in managing elections, with WebEOC, in Atlanta, Fulton County, which, coincidentally, is where Javari is based out of out of Atlanta. That’s where I’m I’m from, and a lot of folks, from, Javari are based out of Atlanta as well. But without further ado, let’s kinda dive into it here.

So today’s agenda will cover our, session objectives, some of the challenges of elections management.

We’ll do a brief introduction to WebEOC Nexus for those that are not familiar with that, you know, next generation of incident management.

We’ll also review the features of the elections management solution, and then I’m gonna turn it over to Donnie and let him share, how his team, uses the solution as well as, you know, his lessons learned and best practices that he wants to share with with you all. We’ll wrap up with a q and a session. If you have questions, feel free to put them in the q a, as, we’re going through. We might hold hold them to the end, but that way when we get to the end, we got some some items to to talk through.

And, then we’ll do some closing remarks and, close out the session and maybe give you some time back. We might not use the full hour.

So in terms of the objectives today, we’re gonna start with, addressing common challenges, in elections management, followed by how WebEOC Nexus can help you tackle these issues and streamline operations.

We’ll also review key features of of the solution, and how it can impact, you know, your efficiency and accountability.

And then, again, Donnie’s going share, his, you know, supported how how the solution has supported their elections management over the last decade, with that live demo and, again, QA.

So what are those challenges? Right?

So most organizations have many polling locations. So, you know, as an emergency manager, you’re trying to coordinate all these, discrete locations and personnel at all these different locations, and and that in itself presents, some different challenges that I’m sure Donnie can can spend a lot more time than we have today to on those. But he’ll he’ll touch briefly touch on some of those. We’re also gonna be monitoring, wait times or how you monitor wait times with the the solution. That can be, something that, you know, your leadership wants to know, and to make sure that no particular site is, you know, having significant wait times for the public.

You’re also wanting to coordinate logistics and resources. Right? So the printer is broken or the the person that’s supposed to unlock the building, you know, didn’t show up. I mean, there’s all sorts of, I think, stories that Donna could tell you of of these sort of logistical challenges and, things that he’s faced, that, the solution helped to, provide coordination for. Also, ensuring trans transparency and accountability, responding to these things in real time or as close to real time as as possible, maintaining communication with the sites and your teams that are out there in the field providing support.

Obviously, heightened security concerns, in this day and age, and then combating disinformation, ensuring accurate information is being provided to the public, not only on the locations, but other related elections information.

So, again, did wanna touch briefly on Nexus, just because I know we have some folks that aren’t too familiar with WebEOC joining us today, not just existing clients. I think our existing clients are very familiar with Nexus. Nexus is the next generation of WebEOC.

It’s, cloud hosted.

Many of our clients are still transitioning to, to Nexus, including Atlanta Fulton. But, really, we just wanted to make sure we provide an opportunity to touch on it briefly just because, you know, it is it is new and significantly different than, what many folks know to be WebEOC.

So the, you know, user interface has been overhauled, so simplified navigation.

There’s new configurable home pages. You kinda have the cockpit for fast access to your different tools and resources.

The mapping was completely redone, and it’s completely ESRI based now. So the maps load faster, much more broader support for different types of layers, expanded, base map options just built into the solution, and just, just all the things that you would expect with, you know, ESRI based solution, for mapping. So we’re we’re pretty proud of that aspect to it. It is cloud based, so, you know, automatic updates, increased scalability, improved uptime, enhanced security. You know, it includes SSO. It includes multi-factor authentication, includes our, you know, ongoing security, updates and our commitment to, you know, various ISO standards.

And then it’s cost efficient. Right? So you you know, in many cases, there’s actually a reduction in, infrastructure cost because, you know, you’re you’re putting that on Juvare to, maintain as part of a SaaS solution. And you get those quick access to new features. And, of course, you don’t, you know, you don’t need VPN. You just need a device with a browser, and you can access it anywhere. But, you know, know, that’s not limited to Nexus, but, it’s definitely a a key benefit.

But now that we’ve covered kind of the the key, benefits of Nexus, I wanna look closely more closely at the, elections, solution that we’re, you know, here to talk about today. Right? And I’m just gonna scratch the surface on it and really let Donnie, do the show and tell and and, again, share his, all his experience, and and lessons learned that I think a lot of folks are very interested in. Donnie said he’s he’s never gotten as many calls as he has as, for this, as, you know, in the past with other solutions. So there’s there’s obviously a lot of interest out there on this, so we’re excited to talk about it today and and get those, questions answered, and and show you how the solution works. But, essentially, the key features are, efficient monitoring. So you have basically a database or a, you know, the ability to manage all your various, locations, polling locations.

You can track the real time updates of the status and the, you know, wait times and and kinda monitor that closely.

You can also track, key informational updates at each of those sites as well as logistical requests for those sites. So any sort of, you know, request for, logistics support or request to support those sites, those requests are tied to those sites. So it makes it easy for teams to respond, and manage those requests, and stay informed of statuses. And then also just dashboard to visually, show you quick insights and help with decision making.

But now, really, the the heart of the the presentation, I wanna turn it over to Donnie to, highlight Atlanta col Fulton’s, experience. And, Donnie, I’ll just, stay on the these two slides here, and then, I’ll turn it over to you, and you can share your screen when when you’re ready to to do the demo.

Certainly. I do wanna start at the beginning. Just quick check. You can hear me right?

Hear you well.

Perfect.

Yeah. Absolutely. This is actually this is very exciting for me.

We have worked with elections, I believe, since 2012.

And I must admit, because I imagine a lot of the folks on the call are also emergency managers.

I must admit that when I got started and handed, like, this project back then, I was very hesitant. I was like, wait a minute. Why are we getting involved with elections? Don’t we have enough fires to fight?

So I’d like to at least give you that story. Matt, can I can I go ahead and share?

Beautiful.

And let’s see here. Screen two. Share.

And can I just get a confirmation that you can see everything?

Yep. Awesome. So I dug out an old guide. This is our, like, our old PowerPoint guide, not from twenty twelve, but from twenty fourteen. So this is ten years ago, WebEOC working with elections.

Our elections department and one of the things that I’ve learned in doing this is that there is no, like, book for this. There’s no, like, tool.

I was always kind of shocked to find that out when working with elections that every county, at least near us, kinda does it their own way.

In 2012, Fulton County actually have gotten audited, because they had a really bad elections event, and that’s that’s how we got involved, from this audit. So, essentially, the way it used to work is on election day, like, the county would close, and we would use our county help desk tool for, like, the in the, IT department, and all the precinct managers would just email this email box their issues. And then, like, we had this giant clearing house of people trying to direct traffic out of email. It was it was very hard to keep track of, like, who was doing what assignments, anything actually being followed through.

So we have the big audit. The county is looking for solutions, and my director at the time, actually, he pitched WebEOC and he pitched he pitched me. He said, hey. We we have a tool that kinda does this, and we’ve got a a kid here that can do it when you wanna work with him.

And, so we started. We started back in twenty twelve, and we started like everything started. I I see most people are looking at the screen now. It’s a blast from the past.

If you guys have never seen it before, this is a WebEOC ten years ago. We started with the basics. Right? We we started with an event log, to keep track of updates and situations that are coming through.

We added a couple filters that you’re kind of seeing here at the top and these little buttons, and a resource request board, right, where they could track issues with printers and ballots and things like that.

We have done thirty six election incidents in WebEOC since twenty twenty. I did a quick count here.

So for the last ten, fifteen years since 2012, we do every, early voting incident, every election day incident, every runoff incident, every special election incident, all throughout the year. So we we do easily four or five of these a year. So this process and this tool you’re seeing, it’s it’s gone through annual refinement and reiteration constantly.

Around the the new WebEOC, WebEOC eight, we started building status board for all of the precincts where you could keep track of which ones were open, which ones were closed, were they closed all the time, what is the what is the wait time, is it over thirty minutes, is it over an hour?

And as we kept refining and kept developing, and as the user base got more accustomed to WebEOC, which is very important, at least here in Fulton County, the elections process is is mainly managed by volunteers. There’s a large amount of volunteers that come in to run precincts on election day. So it’s a it’s a it’s a big lift to just have them, like, onboard and just in time training, and, it needs to be easy. So one of the the terms that I’ve always coined when I’ve explained this process to people is, like, in the IT world, there’s the system on a chip.

Right, where you have the CPU and the GPU, and and then it’s it’s all together instead of being separate parts. Well, one of the things that they really wanted to get to was kind of like a system in a board for WebEOC. Like, going back to WebEOC and the the control panel and and monitoring different boards and and having to look at multiple different places, they were like, we we really want it all in in one board. Can we just, like, do it all in the one thing?

So as I keep clicking through here, this is our process as you’re seeing it probably circa twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, which looked great at the time. Like, this looked really nice then.

But as Design Studio and WebEOC continues to develop, it looks very, very old at this point.

But up until we started working with Juvare, this was kind of what we were working with.

So that same sort of process, those same basic tools that you have. Right? An event log, warehouse requests just built into the board. So we have our status board.

We have all of our precincts here. We have their statuses. We have their colors. And if you wanna report an incident, an event log, you click the button and you’d you’d fill it out.

And if you wanna report a warehouse, you click the button, and you fill it out. And as we kept going down this path, you know, like I said, we keep refining it every election. They’re like, can you do this? Can you do that?

They they love the the customization that WebUC allows, to really make this solution adapt to their process and their workflow.

We just kept building it out, to where we are today, which is why everybody is here on this call.

So I got approached by Matt and the and the team.

He said, I know you’re doing the elections thing. We wanna talk to you about it. And this actually worked out very, very well for us because, as design studio came in, I was rebuilding all of my boards to make, you know, to make it match the new style and and take advantage of all the the new cool whistles that the new boards have. And this process is, you know, it’s not, like, super detailed, but it’s not an insignificant amount of work.

So I wanna walk everybody through the tool. So you have your your precincts. That’s your home page, right, your precinct management. You put in your poll locations, and you can map them.

And in in this form, you can put in, the location name. You can map it, assign a manager, assign a technician, whether or not the pool is open or closed, it open on time, the current, if the the security is assigned, if there’s media on scene, and you can you even have permissions built into the board where you can assign users that can can edit the record. And then once the precinct is actually, made, you can click on the warehouse request and you can make resource requests. You can do the exact same thing for incidents, which we moved over to, little side panel here in the menu, and you can do incidents and report in the event log.

And then as you see at the top, we’ve got tabs for both of those processes where you can click into those, and you can view them, and you can view the records, and you can edit them.

So it’s a lot of parent child stuff is really the the core the crux of what I’m trying to get to. So for those of you admins that have built boards before, especially before Design Studio was invented, it was not an insignificant amount of work to just restyle the entire thing, because, obviously, you wanna be able to search child tables by parent data, so on and so forth.

So when we got the opportunity to work with Juvare, it was kind of a godsend because it was like, man, this is this is exactly what we need because we wanted to rebuild it, but it was going to take significant amount of time.

But then it it got even better from from that point forward, because while they were able to sit down with me and we walked through every single option of the board that I had built before, every form, every field, why it’s there.

I’ve given them all the lessons learned that we have from all of those incidents that we’ve done for fifteen years. There were a lot of fun conversations of of Matt asking me essentially, like, why are you doing it this way? Only for me to tell him a story from twenty fifteen or eighteen, and that’s why we’re doing it this way.

But at the same time, we were always focused on, but let’s make sure that it’s flexible and it has the option, to be adapted to to any jurisdiction.

So not only were they able to take the process that we’ve refined, that’s worked really that worked well here for us, they’ve taken it further and do stuff that I I honestly don’t know how to do, I can never do.

So one of the cool things the features of this board has is it has a built in admin settings to where you can change a lot of the stuff that you would need to customize this process to your jurisdiction.

It’s built into the board. Again, a system in a board. You don’t have to go in and change all the code and everything. If if your thresholds are different than mine, if I’m doing sixty minutes and you’re doing ninety minutes or a hundred and twenty minute, you can change them.

If you wanna reset all of your wait times on the fly, you can do that. If you’re not doing wait times every hour on the hour, let’s say you’re doing it every four hours, three times a day, you can change those. You can change the permissions all built into the board. So I just click into some of these options here and hit save, and now my process has been adapted to your process.

I love that so much. I can’t, I can’t tell you enough. Having done WebEOC and worked with Juvare for so long, seeing more stuff like that just baked right into the boards as a solution are great.

So, yeah, so this is your status page, precinct management, kind of your home page. This is where you see the precinct name, the location.

Right now, we’re logged into our training incident. The reason if there’s anybody out there that’s never done elections, you’re wondering why these, the names are listed twice.

On election day, we’ll actually have precinct names to have, like, state assigned ID numbers.

So our elections department kinda has their own language where they’ll talk about, like so Adams Park Library might be AT precinct thirty six. So it’s a lot easier to everybody just remember the library. So we have that there twice.

And if you click into the event log, you’ll be able to read any events that come through. You can filter and search, by the parent stuff. So if you wanted to click into, let’s say, this particular precinct, you can scroll down and you can see any event logs that have been posted just for this precinct or any requests that have been posted for just this precinct. And then the tabs at the top, you have that more global view where you can scroll through and see all the event logs or all of the requests that have come through.

The requests are a very important part. That’s why the the button is on the home screen as we have this big logistics process. And the reason we we call it the warehouse, the reason is the warehouse is Fulton County actually has an elections warehouse where if you run out of absentee ballots, the printer stops working, whatever it is. You need my Fi card. Your laptop’s broken. Power cables, we we’ve done it all.

If you click on this and fill out the the form and assign it to the appropriate person if you have permissions.

We have it set up on our system, and you can set it up on yours too using the notifications tool to where it automatically alerts our roving technicians and our warehouse crew.

We have them broken down into different regions of the county, and we have those alerts routed directly to that technician. So we have technicians driving around throughout the day delivering equipment and supplies to all these different locations of which we do many.

On election day, I think we’re expected to have over three hundred precincts in Fulton County, I think.

Those technicians, they don’t even log in to WebEOC. They’re being driven constantly by the notifications and radio traffic between them and the warehouse, but they can always follow-up on what they need to do and close it out, just by radioing it back to the warehouse and saying, hey. We delivered that that machine and then the warehouse closes it out. So we have global awareness on on all of our requests and what needs to get done and what doesn’t need to get done.

The next tab, wait times.

This is a process that that has evolved and refined again through every one of those elections over the years. When we first started this, we had just what the wait time was. Every precinct had one wait time, and we updated that one wait time throughout the day. And, then we as we kept doing it and as we kept providing reports, which is another thing that this solution, this tool will, allow you to give your elections department is being able to give them, reporting for awareness, being able to give them track of where things stood throughout the day. They wanted to capture wait times at different periods throughout the day so they could see how it was evolving, as the election day kept going.

So we started doing them every I think we did it at, like, eight, twelve, and four. And then eight, twelve, and four became every, even hour, and then it became, as you see here, every hour. So every hour throughout the day, on the hour, we take a wait time, which is very easy. Users just come in and click on it. And one of the things that I love that they baked in here is that we have JavaScript that knows the nearest hour on the hour automatically set to it, and you just put in your wait time in minutes.

So this not only provides that history, that story for the elections of how this is going in different areas of the county throughout the day, but we actually use the ArcGIS plug in tool to drive a wait time dashboard that’s driven by WebEOC and the call center and all of our precinct managers. So every hour on the hour as these are updated, that is being instantly relayed to ArcGIS online, every five seconds to a dashboard that we put on the county website. It’s on the homepage for the county website that day. And you can go to anybody. Any citizen can go to that dashboard, click on the link, and they can find the nearest poll to them, and they can see the wait time updated every hour on the hour throughout the day.

That kinda transformed, I think, the solution when we got the ArcGIS plugin however many years ago, from Juvare, and that continues to be a staple that we keep doing.

And that is, as Matt mentioned, once the the Juvare notice went out, I I received no less than thirty phone calls from folks wanting to know what we’re doing, how we’re doing it. And then when I tell them that we have a dashboard that people can just look at, it it kinda blows their minds. They’re like, yeah. That’s that’s all we’ve ever wanted.

And I’m here to tell you, if you’ve never done it before, if you’re brand new to this, I’m here to tell you it’s a lot easier than it sounds. The ArcGIS dashboard is very, very easy to, one, implement, but two, just to get running. You essentially just go into the onto the back end. You select the board.

You select some fields. You hit publish, and then you work with your GIS people. They can just grab that service and very easy to drag and drop a dashboard back together.

We also do some totals throughout the day.

We’ll take some totals on kind of, like, ballots, provisional unscanned. It’s not meant to be an accurate count. It’s not even meant to be it’s not even, like, published or public. It’s not meant, like, for anything like that.

It’s merely meant to give our elections director a snapshot throughout the day on just kind of the the throughput, the traffic that we’re seeing out there. Is it pulling above normal, below normal? Like, what is how would the you know? And that kinda goes in with the wait times with lots of wait times over an hour, and we’re seeing lots of ballots cast.

We realize that, you know, we’ve got a lot of traffic out there.

So we do three or four media events throughout the day on election day. So the election director loves having this tool where they can quickly go kind of look at it and get a quick idea throughout the day as it’s being updated just kind of what’s kind of out there. What are we looking at so far before all the ballots are officially totaled tallied at the end of the day?

And then, as Matt mentioned earlier, of course, dashboards. Right? Everybody loves dashboards or billows colors. So we broke them all down, by status, open, open restriction, closed, wait times, our average current wait time, all of our wait times, all of our request statuses.

We have this I love this one down here in the corner, locations reporting issues. So on that main page, that hub page again, that would be any issue kind of totaled up together. So any outstanding, you know, media on scene or didn’t open on time ring, it’s kind of all rolled into one, and you can gotta get a big global view of these are how many outstanding issues we’re currently working on. This is great stuff for executives, for leadership As they come through, they wanted an idea on what’s going on. We always have this dashboard up on the wall.

We both activate the emergency operations center as well as we actually send a team to the elections warehouse. We’re on-site where we can either provide, support, training, or address any issues that they may have throughout the day. So, the county really relies on the EMA team to keep them connected, to the tool.

So that rebuild was was, like I said, super important.

And I just want to reiterate, why WebEOC? I think that’s very important in today’s world especially because there’s a million things out there that can take, like, data. Right? Take forms.

The reason that we use WebEOC, and I think the reason it’s been so successful, at least with us, is that while there are a lot of tools out there that can do forms. Right? I’m just gonna open a form. There’s lots of things you can customize a form like this and have people take data.

I’ve actually seen, elections department at state levels do just that. They find a tool, they build a form, They try to implement it. The thing that it doesn’t do, however, is process flow, workflow, permissions. Like I said, Fulton County is very heavily reliant on volunteers.

So just having, like, a public forum that anybody can touch or even, I’m not gonna use any other vendor, but any any other thing where you have, like, a a shared account or something, really doesn’t drive the process. You wanna be able to permission and control, who can see what, who can edit what, when they edit it, where does that go to right what what’s driving the machine? What’s keeping that follow-up going? As I mentioned earlier, back in twenty twelve, there were lots of people sending emails to that help desk. But where was the the consolation? Where was the closeout? That’s something that WebEOC does very, very well versus all of those other tools.

And so for this new tool that we have, we’ve had this one, I think, for four or five elections now, for the past year, maybe maybe four. I think it’s four. And I just gotta say, I think I think everyone loves it. We participated in a statewide elections exercise, I think, about a month ago where we got to really, work with other counties across the state.

And as you can imagine, next month is, like, it’s the big one. And I think the reason that I’m getting so much interaction with this board and the reason that so many people have joined the call is we’re getting folks from law enforcement, from the sheriff, from CISA, from cybersecurity.

Everybody wants to be involved, and it’s important. They all have a role to play.

The thing that I’m finding in those interactions is that there’s a lot of surprise out there that not only do we have a system, a process in place, a tool, but a lot of people are stunned to see that it’s it’s so refined that we have it’s gone through so much iteration.

And I’m not here to say it’s it’s the best. This is just what we came up with and what worked for us.

But I do think, you know, over the last fifteen years or so, it it’s it’s succeeded, many, many times.

Even last year with the ransomware working with Javari, it was very easy to deport that board over and re-stand it back up, and we ran a whole election, during that during that outage.

So it’s been very flexible. It’s been very successful.

I didn’t mention that it has, you know, all the map and and and all the things that you would expect. It’s all built in. Like I said, that system and a board, it’s the whole thing is wrapped together.

Again, I can’t thank Juvare enough.

Matt, if there’s anything in particular you wanted me to cover that I didn’t, please let me know. But after that Yeah.

I have a few items that I think would be good for you to elaborate on.

And then while while we’re kind of talking about those those few things, I think now is the time for for the audience that has questions, get them entered in so that we can get those answered. I think we’re definitely gonna be able to give you some time back here, as we’re, you know, starting to wrap up. But I think, Donnie, for the things that, it might be interesting. I mean, you just touched on, the different permissions and roles.

Could you speak to that a little bit in terms of, like, what are the roles? You you talked about how some folks are in the field. They’re kind of calling that in. But can you talk about the roles of the folks that are in the system?

What are those people doing? Also, training is probably another thing people are probably interested in. What what sort of training do you provide, for those different, levels of users? I think those are a couple things folks would probably wanna know a little bit more about.

Absolutely. So we we’ve got different kinds of users.

We we’ve got the precinct managers, the volunteers. These are the people that are are at every one of these locations.

They have we do train them to log in to the board and have access to the board and be able to edit the board freely, and most of them do.

Some of them, however, are either very, very busy, which is normally the case. Some of these precincts get hammered with you know, they have lines out the door. So sometimes they don’t have the time to sit down at the computer and update WebEOC. So we have a call center where at any time they can pull up their cell phone and they can call the call center directly, and then they can just phone that in.

And then the call center has people there that can enter it in and keep track of it in WebVOC and still provide all the alerts and everything. So that’s like the elections user. We also have election staff that use it. Those assignments so if I go back to that to the precinct when you have the assigned user, so you can actually assign it to individual users, so only that user can update it.

In the settings tab for the admin panel that I was talking about earlier, you can change that. So if you wanna make it by position, you just sign it to a position or you can turn it off.

We’ve kind of dabbled with all three. I think it really kinda varies based on how the elections department’s feeling. I think for the big ones, they kinda go for the user, and I think for the smaller ones, they go to the position.

But that’s how the elections department uses it. But there’s a lot more people that use this tool than just that. So we have our security force, our county police, local city police, and all of our sheriff details. We now put a law enforcement officer at every precinct location.

They also all have access to the tool and can follow along and report issues and do the event log and the resource request and all of that as well.

We have different people throughout the county, executives, things like that that want awareness, different emergency management coordinators for different jurisdictions, different departments, throughout the county, hospitals, university cities. They have read only access where they can log in. They can’t see, like, any of the numbers or anything, but they can generally see if it’s open or closed, if there are any issues. They can view wait times, because all of that’s permission-able.

And you have the EMA staff, obviously, that kinda have that that super user access.

So those permissions, and those different being able to deliver this view differently to meet different needs of different folks, is super important.

On the training front, you know, I I don’t have it pulled up. This is our old one. We we have a training guide. We have a PowerPoint guide that, you know, point and clicks people through it.

We also have a training video. It’s very simple. I think it’s maybe seven, ten minutes, on our YouTube channel. And, the way our elections department is when they hire the volunteers to come in and do the thing, they bring them all to the warehouse, they sit them down, they go through the video, everybody gets the guide.

And then what you’re seeing right now, we’re in elections November training incident. All of this data that you’re seeing and everything’s been this is them doing live testing that they do usually about two weeks ahead of advanced voting, which is about right. We should hit advanced voting. I don’t remember the exact date.

I wanna say I think it’s the maybe the twelfth or the fourteenth, somewhere around there.

So they’re doing testing and training now, where they will bring people back in and they give them scenarios and here’s how you log a request, here’s how you log an incident, and that sort of thing. When we have incidents that are let’s say it’s it’s important. So if somebody ports an incident of, you know, an active shooter or a fire, the one that we’ve had in a real life scenario that was a a big one is we actually had a a tractor trailer turn over at an intersection that was blocking access to a pole location, which was a huge problem.

So when we get those requests, we have the ability to then take that and obviously share that with our local partners at different cities to get support and help, and they can log in and monitor that as well.

So we were able actually to get a detour set up around that incident pretty quickly because they had access to all the information. It was very simple. I pick up the phone. I call my coordinator.

We got a tractor trailer turned down. It’s on the elections board, and they go, great. I’ll log in to it, see it, and we’ll get somebody out there.

So, yeah, that that cross jurisdictional support is greatly aided by by the tool.

Thanks. I know there was another question on, the ability to import and export, you know, versus HandGem and these these records in, and there’s definitely, built in capabilities, for both importing and exporting.

Because chances are you already got that data, so no need to have to, manually enter that.

Absolutely. Yeah. I I don’t I never we we don’t manually enter any of the stuff. The the elections department, they send me their precincts and their their, you know, their addresses, and I set up an import sheet from the tool using data manager, and I just import everything in. And then in the tool, once again, just to shout out those settings, you can update all of those statuses kind of automatically.

So I can change all the wait times or all the statuses or open closed status automatically just by clicking these options and clicking the button. So being able to, like, batch edit and update, that saved me a ton of time. That’s that’s very helpful.

Thank you. We also have a question.

Can you talk more about wait times? So I guess just elaborating a little bit more on, the wait time management aspect.

So the wait times, like I said, every precinct manager has the ability to do it themselves, or they can phone that in. They can call the call center and say, hey. I’m reporting my eight AM wait time. It’s thirty minutes.

The call center would then come in, click it, click edit. I’m just gonna since I’m doing eight, I’m gonna click eight. I’m gonna put in thirty minutes.

And then those thresholds are built into the board. Right? So you can change those. So for us, anything under thirty minutes is is we’re all green.

That’s good for us. We’re we’re very happy with that time. Once it starts getting over sixty minutes, it’s gonna start changing colors. And when it starts getting over an hour and a half, it’s gonna go red.

And, generally, when you’re looking at this board, day of and it’s completely full, we’re really trying to address any red areas throughout the day. If we start seeing ninety minutes, especially if it’s ninety minutes for multiple hours, we’re gonna start making calls. What do you need to lower that? Can can we get you another another machine?

Can we split lines? What’s the holdup? Or are you having technical issues, to kind of address those those, problem problem areas?

So they can either do it themselves or call it in. And then, I mean, I I could pull it up. I’m just sure if anybody wants to see it. Or, actually, you have it on the slide, so let me stop sharing.

Matt, if you could go to that slide that has what the dashboard looks like.

There you go. And then that’s exactly what one of our live dashboards looks like.

This is very easy because you you go to the our ArcGIS plugin and WebEOC. You pick the board, you pick the field, you hit send, you go log in to RGS online, you grab that service.

They have tools where you can drag and drop this dashboard together yourself. But if you don’t want to or don’t need to, if you have GIS department, you just have them do it. And that’s what I do. This is a partnership with our GIS team, and I go, hey, guys.

Here’s the new service. Alright. We do one for every incident. So we do one for early voting.

We do one for election day, all the special runoffs, all special elections.

And, yeah, as it updates because it updates, like, every five seconds on the pool service. So those wait times will update in real time. So every hour as they come through and fill them out, you’re gonna see all of those, dashboard metrics at the bottom. Wait time less than thirty minutes.

Wait wait less than hour. And you’ll see all the icons change colors. You can also go in there. There’s usually a widget.

It’s probably not in the screenshot, but every dashboard has a widget where you can type in, like, your address, and it’ll give you the nearest ones. And you can click on which one and and see not only the address, and the name, but also which one has the the shortest wait time near you. So you can go to that one. And our elections department has told me many, many times that this this tool, this process has been a of great help to them because because not only is it on the county website, I mean, it it’s shared all over.

Right? We’re in the digital world. We tweeted out. We posted on Facebook. People shared around.

I think they even have I think they even have, like, an elections app now that you can download that has this tool, this dashboard that’s just being driven by WebEOC users just embedded into it. So if you’re, if you live in Fulton County, download the elections app, you can open it, and you’re gonna see that dashboard powered by Nexus.

Couple other questions.

My elections commissioners couldn’t attend. Basically asking whether this will be recorded and link shared. Yes. It’s being recorded, and, yes, the link will be shared.

Also a question on reporting capabilities. I was kind of, just responded that, you know, you can PDF any of those views. So either the specific precinct view with all the details about the events and and requests for that particular site or from the, you know, request page or from the events page, you get PDF all the items, you know, on those pages.

Alternatively, WebEOC has a reporter tool that could be used to build, you know, a custom report.

So, you know, decent amount of options, there for reporting on a if you wanna What I do for yeah.

What I do for every one of our events is after the event is over, I archive the incident.

I data dump into Excel, this entire board. I usually go through and provide a little cleanup because as an admin in WebView, you’ll see things on back end notification serial things, columns that, you know, don’t amount to them, kinda drop those, and then PDF all that and just send it all to the elections director, and the county manager. Here’s every event log that was posted. Here’s every resource request that was posted. Every time the wait time was updated, who did it, date and time stamp.They’ve never had that sort of visibility ever until they started using these tools.

There was a question on, whether you thought about using quick capture for from Esri, for field use. I’m you know, I’m not too familiar with that tool.

I don’t know if you have any I’m not either, Graham.

My GIS team would have to do something. But if they want to, I mean, I’m all open for integrating as much or as little I mean, as much as possible. I I’m I love doing that, which is, again, why we do the RTS stuff. So if our RTS team ever wanna bring that to the elections department, they wanna do it, I’m all ears to doing whatever I can from the WebView side to make it happen.

Thank you.

I see Douglas about the survey one, two, three.

That was something I was talking about earlier. Like, yeah, you can do survey one, two, three to to take data from the field, but then how are you using that data and how is that data driving something else? That was always, the challenge with survey one two three, which was the tool that the state department they tried to roll out a solution like this with survey one two three years ago years ago, I think, twenty seventeen or eighteen. And, it it didn’t really get off the ground.

They had a a dashboard that was up, that you could see, but the problem was people would fill out a survey one, two, three, four. It would go on the map, but then nothing was driving that to be closed out. There was no entity or process closing that loop. It just went on the map, and everybody could look at it on the map.

Very good. And one final question on, how quickly this could be implemented. So I actually just talked with our implementation team about this today be knowing the proximity we are to the election. So if we had to, we could turn this on within a week, two weeks max.

A little bit quicker than normal just given the the circumstances and, you know, wanting to be able to support folks in that in that situation.

But, obviously, that’s that’s a short we have a short time frame up until the November election, but but certainly, there’ll be no elections after that. So that’s the answer on that one. I guess just, any final questions? We’ll just monitor just for another minute here.

I do say I I understand how Nexus can be very daunting, intimidating.

That’s why having a professional solution that’s kind of prebuilt and kind of taken all that into account.

If you’re handy with Excel and you have this this solution, you can plug it into your system. I imagine most WebEOC folks with general admin experience could probably set this up in a day.

And that’s the goal. Right? The goal to to your point earlier with the configuration options and things, is just to bring more of those things to the user where there’s no need to get in there and change things because we basically have it set up where we can like, for example, one thing I don’t think we talked about, the, the, voter number, tabulation.

We we definitely had some discussions and said some organizations will want not wanna use this feature. So there’s an ability to disable that.

You can just turn that entire tab off if you don’t want it.

Right. Exactly. So if it’s not needed, you just turn it off. And and that’s obviously, I you know, more ideal than, you know, expecting clients to, you know, figure out how to do that.

Especially, like like I said, right now, if we need to turn this on, I mean, realistically, we could turn it on tomorrow. And like you said, I mean, get it up and running extremely quickly. And that’s some of the benefit for these things being turnkey solutions, versus things that need to be, you know, built out and and tailored per per organization. So absolutely.

And I would like to reiterate, our WebEOC system that I serve, our county, we have fifteen jurisdictions. It’s very normal for me when I’m building boards to understand that you can’t build one thing for everyone.

And if I could just reiterate, that was, I think, at the core of the working with Javara to build the solutions to make it as flexible as possible to where if you got the board, you’re like, oh, this doesn’t work for me because we don’t do it like Fulton County. You don’t have to worry about that with this board. Almost everything in this board, I think, can be adapted to your county and how your county wants to do it. Like, almost everything is kind of optional. You can kind of choose to turn on, turn off, use as much or as little as you need to out of out of the the toolkit.

Absolutely.

And and as part of that last, question, they were kinda asking about more resources. If you get in touch with us, we could definitely share more resources. I mean, we’ve done trainings on this solution. We have, you know, general WebUC, trainings and and recordings. So if folks are interested in learning more at, about any of the things we talked about today, just reach out.

Donnie’s email’s here. My email’s here, and we’ll, get you what you need. But, I did wanna give everyone some time back. I think we’ve gone through all the questions that were in the chat here.

So thanks everyone for joining today, and, all the best to you, in your elections management and, in your incident management solutions. And, Donnie, thanks so much for sharing your experience. I know everyone was happy, hear about your experience with this solution and really appreciate you taking the time, especially with everything going on, with Helene and everything, all the other events in the area.

So many. But thank you, It was my pleasure.

My, emergency management bingo card is is almost filled up. So alright, everyone. Thanks. Have a good one.