Crisis Management Suite

Module/Project Name: Crisis Management

Scenario: A shooter has just taken several hostages in the biology lab of the local community college. The faculty and student body have been alerted through the campus alert system, the administrative staff are on-site doing what they can to help authorities, and the PR department is swamped handling phone calls from friends, parents, and the media.

This is possibly one of the worst nightmares that anyone can face and it's easy to panic. This is why there are crisis management meetings, procedures, alert systems, and drills. There is a chain of command that will be followed if someone cannot be found or is incapacitated. A group of people, such as a crisis management team, need to be able to rapidly disseminate accurate information across a spectrum of medium.

Proposal: I propose a crisis management module. This module will provide key members of an organization to set in motion a predetermined set of actions to deal with a crisis at the click of a button.

Example actions to take in crisis mode

• Activate a special crisis theme
• Disable or change blocks
• Create special crisis content type (e.g. used in crisis theme to provide vital blog-style updates)
• Change access control permissions (e.g. allow only crisis content type, shrink menu complexity, only specified person can disable crisis mode)
• Disable as many modules as possible to improve Web site performance
• Send SMS/Email alerts to a preset group of people
• and more . . .

After the crisis is over, the Web site administrator should be able to disable crisis mode, at which time any actions taken will be reversed. For example, restore normal theme, block arrangements, etc.

The Key Feature: Crisis Management will allow privileged users to easily and quickly set in motion tasks that have been predetermined. The time for the Web site to transition into crisis mode can be taken from 30 minutes to a matter of seconds. In the example actions above, any member of the crisis team would then be able to post updates.

Implementation, Flexibility, and Deliverables: The Crisis Management module will make heavy use of Drupal triggers and actions. It needs to be as flexible as possible to fit the needs of the organization. The module will provide several actions out of the box (including previously mentioned ones). Core functionality will also be easily extended to allow actions tailored to the organization's need. For example, a custom module could show a javascript overlay warning that the Web site is weathering a DDoS attack. Or, perhaps the organization wants to put a prerecorded video on the site.

Official and complete Proposal: http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/student_proposal/show/google/gsoc2010/jonstacey/t127068934424

Additional Notes:

• I anticipate project completion ahead of the timeline included in the official proposal. I want to explore adding additional tools such as the ability to collect information via text messages and integrating with existing crisis management systems like Ushahidi during that time.
• I will be working full-time on this (i.e. 40+/hr week).
• This is not intended to be a profile install [at least for now]. The idea is that the suite can be installed at anytime allowing both existing and new Drupal installations to make use of the toolset. However, with remaining time I would be interested in including some predesigned profiles that could be bundled with the suite to make configuration less time consuming.
• While the primary target of this suite of modules is organizations with a need to incorporate their Web presence into their crisis response procedures, the individual components of this module would be reusable in other areas. For example, setting up a "ack! I'm being dugg" button to perform specific operations when being dugg.