Do you turn your computer and peripherals off when you leave for the day?   If everyone would turn his or her computer and peripherals off when they leave, it could save a significant amount of money and, at the same time, help make this a greener world by reducing our carbon footprint.

Catawba County urges employees to shut their computer down when they leave for the day, unless the computer is tied to other crucial services or needs to stay on for maintenance purposes. This is an expectation of all employees.  We encourage you to adopt the same practice.

While our employees shut their computer down every day, Catawba County will be participating in the National Association of Counties, “Power IT Down Day” on August 27, 2009.  NACo, along with its partners, is asking that counties participate in this nationwide initiative.  More information is included below about the savings that could be realized when this is done on a nationwide basis.

So what do you need to do if you would like to participate?  If you shut your computer and peripherals down every day, you just need to sign up for the program at the Power IT Down Day  web site and continue shutting down as normal.  If you have not been shutting your computer down every day, please make this part of your daily routine and visit the Power IT Down Day web site to sign up to participate on August 27th.

Thank you for helping Catawba County save energy and the environment.

The National Association of Counties is sponsoring “Power IT Down Day” on August 27, 2009

On a single day this summer, county governments across the country could dramatically slash energy consumption costs with the flick of a switch.

On August 27, 2009, the most trusted names in green IT will join together for the second year to make a change for the better with “Power IT Down Day.” Citrix, along with Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Microsoft, has committed to switching off personal computers and peripherals when leaving the office for the evening on August 27 and have challenged all levels of government to do the same.

Last year, over 2,800 government and industry employees pledged to power down their computers, printers and monitors on Power IT Down Day - a one-day savings of over 37,000 kilowatt-hours.

If only one percent of county governments’ 2.9 million employees (source: 2007 Census) participated in Power IT Down Day, more than 380,000 kilowatt-hours could be saved. That comes to an energy cost-savings of more than $38,000 in a single night.

Power IT Down Day encourages government to embrace responsible energy usage at the individual level. And, inspired by the cost-savings generated by Power IT Down Day, Citrix and our green IT partners plan to donate more than $20,000 to the Wounded Warrior Project.

 As a practice and as part of our Green Initiatives, Catawba County recommends that all computers and peripherals that are not performing a function be shut down when the employee leaves for the day. We will use “Power IT Down Day” to remind our staff that their computers should be shut down every day when they leave work or are going to be away from their desk for an extended period of time.

 To sign up and learn more about green IT in government, staff will be encouraged to visit the Power IT Down Day Web site.

This  is the last article in a series of blogs related to 911 and what it should look like in the future.  Over the last few weeks, a series of questions that were posed to different groups for input were summarized and reveal the concepts that we feel make up the Next Generation of 911.  This last section talks about regional vs local models.

Should 911 Move to Regional Center verses the Current Local Model?

As 911 moves to NG911, it is important to look at regional verses local models.  How can data be passed ? What is the cost? How do you provide backup resources? And most important, how can the people best be served?

Some of the advantages of having regional 911 centers would be:

• regional centers would make it easier to set consistent standards across the state
• Regional centers could better facilitate resource sharing by acting as backups for each other and by load balancing in times of high demand.
• Larger staffs at regional centers could be specially trained and dedicated to certain types of calls.

Some of the advantages of having local 911 centers would be:

• Local centers are more familiar with the needs of the community they serve
• Local centers are more familiar with the area and may have better GIS and mapping data available for the area
• Local centers could back each other up and load balance using NG911 standards.
• Having more local 911 centers reduces the security risks posed by having a few regional centers.

In discussing regional verses local, several questions come up.  Would regional 911 centers be call taking and dispatch or would they only be call taking and leave dispatch to local agencies?  Acting as call taking and dispatch makes the assumption that communication is fully interoperable and that 911 is one coherent system from the call taking process to the response in the field.  If regional centers are acting as call taking only and passing dispatch to local agencies, one has to make the assumption that local centers are capable of receiving all the data from the regional center and able to passing it on to responders.

Regional verses local is one area that will have to be studied in depth to determine the best delivery system.  This will be a balancing act between most efficient delivery of services, cost of delivery, and the emotional, political aspects of the delivery of service.

The mind maps created in the brainstorming session can be viewed at:

IT Governance Committee:  http://mind42.com/pub/mindmap?mid=df3eda39-6c8a-4f82-a3af-9a857803dee4 

Public Safety Information Committee: http://mind42.com/pub/mindmap?mid=6cc1eafb-c9e2-4a1e-ac12-683a5e6936cc

Regional 911 Administrators:  http://mind42.com/pub/mindmap?mid=a24ff7c5-07bb-46c2-85fb-5cbbe4913c00

Mind maps created using Mind42.

This  is the fourth article in a series of blogs related to 911 and what it should look like in the future.  Over the next few weeks, a series of questions that were posed to different groups for input will be summarized and reveal the concepts that we feel make up the Next Generation of 911.

What are the standards for 911?

Standards are going to be very important for 911 in the future.  In order to collect data, exchange data and pass data to responders, data must be in a format that is universally recognizable.  Data standards need to be defined at the national level to ensure that data can flow between centers at a local, regional and state level, as well as, exchange data with federal agencies.

 To begin addressing this, the question of what 911 means surfaces again.  In that question, callers to 911 expect to be connected to a trained professional.  That implies that training for telecommunicators must be the same across the state. At a minimum, telecommunicators in all North Carolina 911 centers should be EMD certified and the 911 center should be using the EMD protocol.  It also means that there should be levels of staffing adequate to ensure that callers never get a busy signal.  There may be some room for staffing standards to be employed throughout the state.  At this time, there are not good standards available to determining the number of telecommunicators needed in a center.  Further, the lack of standards makes it difficult for 911 Center managers to justify staffing needs to city/county managers and elected officials.

This  is the third article in a series of blogs related to 911 and what it should look like in the future.  Over the next few weeks, a series of questions that were posed to different groups for input will be summarized and reveal the concepts that we feel make up the Next Generation of 911.

What data should 911 be able to process?

The original question asked in the discussion was “What should 911 look like in 2020?”  This takes us in the direction of Next Generation 911 and all of its potential to move and analyze data.  So what are the data implications for 911 in the future?

Currently, 911 calls come in on voice lines and are dispatched over the radio.  The data that comes in with these calls is ANI/ALI (Automatic Number Identification/Automatic Location Identification).  This includes the telephone number and the location of the number.  With older cell phones, the location may be the cell tower the call originated from. New cell phones give the GPS location of the caller.  Other data is gathered directly from the caller by a telecommunicator and is usually specific to the caller and the call at that moment.

Now consider what is possible if information could come in from virtually any source.  If the caller had a new cell phone, data could be sent in the form of text messages, email or voice.  The caller could also send pictures and perhaps video.  All of this information, whether transmitted by voice or data would be beneficial to the responders.  For example, a picture of a car crash could help determine the appropriate response.  In other scenarios, text messages could be sent silently protecting the location of the caller or provide a hearing impaired person a readily available method of contacting 911.

Data would not be limited to coming from phones. New model cars are being equipped with ACN(Automatic Crash Notification).  One familiar service is OnStar. Data from ACN can be passed directly to 911 and relayed to responders.  Depending on the system, ACN data can include vehicle speed, force of impact, areas of damage and is tied with GPS.  Some systems include sensors to detect body vitals such as heartbeat and temperature.

Another source of data is video.  Video can be passed from cell phones, surveillance cameras, news feeds, car cameras in law enforcement units, and  all types of web cams including traffic cams. These could be triggered to send information based on data from crash systems, traffic flow sensors, signal sensors, etc.  Having good video data during a response ensures that appropriate resources are sent and that there is not an over or under response to an incident.

Monitoring services have the potential to send very valuable data to 911.  Services like home security companies could have sensors on doors, window and rooms of a house including basement and attic areas to monitor everything from intrusion, fire, water and other dangerous things like carbon monoxide levels.  Most of these companies create a floor plan when installing the system so that they will know where a sensor is triggered.  Although all of this useful data is available today, a monitoring service is still forced to manually call a 911 Center and give information via voice communication.   With NG911 technology, monitoring services could pass any of this data directly to 911 and 911 could pass it to responding agencies.  Consider how useful it would be for law enforcement responding to a break in if they could see movement of the burglars on a diagram of the house and know which door the burglars are likely to exit.

Monitoring services are big users of sensors but in today’s security conscious world, sensors are being used by many agencies.  Sensors are being placed along major interstates to detect things like radiation, chemicals, and biological traces.  Other sensors detect more mundane things like roads that may be flooded or just reduced traffic flow.  Whatever the sensor is being used for, the data collected from it has the potential to be processed and passed through 911 to aid in emergency response.

Another form of security entering the market from the video surveillance arena is video detection.  This technology comes in many forms.  Some common to public safety are license plate recognition (LPR), facial recognition, and incident recognition.  LPR is used to detect stolen vehicles or vehicles wanted for some reason.  Facial recognition is being used for security at public buildings and at special events to detect security threats.  Incident recognition can be programmed to detect just about any action out of the norm.  For example, it could detect a slower traffic pattern on the highway while in a mall parking lot it could detect someone being abducted.  While this is a growing market area that may not be in use everywhere, 911 through NG911 should be able to process and pass this data to appropriate entities.

To this point, only data coming from outside sources has been discussed thus far.  All of the EMS, law, fire and rescue units in the field are constantly sending data back to 911.  This includes times, status and availability as well as location data from GPS.  So how would or could 911 process this amount of data.  Systems of the future must have some type of command and control built in.  It must be able to look at information coming in from unrelated sources and combine it together in some useful format for the particular incident that it is related to.  Once combined, pertinent data to the incident should be passed to responders.  This is a very difficult piece to put in place but a necessary one for future service to the public.

In the future, there will be a tremendous amount of data coming at 911 and as we talk about NG911, we must provide the capacity to receive it and to process it.