Hello Tech Work Group!

Notes from our October meeting are below. In addition, please note the date change for our next meeting. Due to a variety of factors, our next meeting will be Thursday 10 December 2020.

• Justin Jurek advised the group that the Jetty Training item had cleared FBC procurement and now is at TRG. Classes should be scheduled soon. In addition, a survey will go out to Jetty Site Administrators to determine the need for the Blog2Social plugin on sites; limits on the number of users per site may be set but the survey will help set a baseline need. In addition, the translation plugin will be activated in the near future (uses Google Translate). Jetty is also looking into enabling the ability to delete and unsent draft bulk email, they expect document security to be available soon, and are still looking into whether site Guests (people who log into the site to view secure pages) can have their access limited to specific sections rather than all secure pages.
• Meghan Arthur reported that Fort Bend County, Galveston County, Montgomery County, and the City of Houston had all provided updated IPAWS certificates for use with AlertFM. The test certificate for Fort Bend is still pending with FEMA. Brazoria County is no longer using the system.
• Lisa Spivey provided a recap of Tuesday’s WebEOC meeting. Shelli Carter has moved to a new position within the City of Houston, and in the interim, Lisa Spivey (along with the Tech WG chairs) will run the work group, while Houston OEM will provide coverage for incident creation (please email both yaneth.calderon@houstontx.gov and hamilton.howard@houstontx.gov). The City of Houston will brief out at RCC next week on two options from Juvare should in-depth development support be needed in the period before a new administrator is hired, but we also still have our standard support options available to us for urgent needs. In addition, a process review survey went out on Tuesday with a due date of 30 November; any jurisdiction/agency with a Sentinel or Sub-Administrator is asked to complete it, though other jurisdictions/agencies may as well. Finally, there will be some follow-up conducted with work group members who do not attend regularly to ensure that regional participation is maintained.
• The GIS Work Group saw a presentation from ESRI on new advances in GIS technologies that can support regional situational awareness. In addition, as the City of Houston has hired a new GIS analyst for their OEM (Will Alvis), Jared will work to transition Will onto the Technology Work Group over the next few months. Jared also suggested that Will would be a suitable replacement for Jared as a co-chair of the GIS Work Group, and a final decision on that will be made by the RCC chair.
• Ian Feldman advised that Haystax added a feature to store additional tabular data for assets on the asset overview page (with customizable field types). The initial use will be for facility insurance records for public building damage assessment in the City of Houston, though other uses are possible. In addition, the Houston Health Department’s pollution control division is looking at Haystax as a tool to help bridge disparate systems they use for air monitoring.
• Finally, the group completed its review of the Stakeholder Preparedness Review (SPR) Gaps that relate to RCC to see if any can be bridged by regional technologies. Additionally, input was gathered on some gap language to help improve the document overall. Recommended changes will be submitted to the RCC Chair for review prior to final inclusion in the updated SPR document.

The next meeting is Thursday 10 December 2020 at 1:00 pm via HSIN Connect and the conference line. Please again note the change from the usual meeting schedule; please update your calendars accordingly. A notice will be sent in November to remind people of the date change in addition to the traditional pre-meeting agenda email.

Thanks!

Ian and Lach