SARScene 2013

SARScene 2013 is at the Pacific Region Training Centre in Chilliwack BC this year. I’ll be attending, presenting, facilitating, exhibiting and cheering in equal measure.

Exhibiting

I’m an exhibitor at the SARScene Trade Show and media day!

My real job is as a software engineer where I run my own software development and consultancy, BlueToque Software.

I will be at booth 24 all day on Saturday October 19th, come by and I will give you a demo of some of my software and talk about some interesting projects I am involved in, including the following:

TrueNorth Geospatial

For the past several years I’ve been working on a Geographic Information System inspired by my own experiences as a backcountry adventurer and SAR volunteer – I basically took my own needs and implemented them in a software package that provides the power of the GIS that is simple to use.

The core concept is that a backcountry professional needs to use a map in a way that is fundamentally different than a person (GIS Technician) does. While you may hire a GIS expert to make a map or to analyse some data, most backcountry users don’t need to make a map, they need to use it. They are interested in getting the job done, whether that job is climbing a mountain, running a seismic line, or finding a lost person.

To than end, TrueNorth Geospatial was born.

YourLo.ca/tion

The YourLo.ca/tion service was prototyped over a single weekend when I realized that there was a simple way to activate the GPS on a mobile phone and that this could make the process of locating a lost person simpler and less error prone.

Since then new features have been added to make the service easier to use and to host it on mission critical server infrastructure. We also added a team tracking feature. I’ll be demoing this at SARScene as well.

Presenting

I will be presenting as part of a panel on the topic of Social Media and Search and Rescue, or under the #SMEM hashtag as I wrote about a few days back.

The presentation is on Monday October 21st 2013 from 10:30 to 12:00 in Building 1122, Theatre

My co-panellists are

• Colin Weibe, Police Officer at Abbotsford PD, SAR member at Central Fraser Valley SAR
  and Vice President of the BC Search and Rescue Association,
• Ashley Spilak, the Social Media expert with Emergency Management BC,
• Julie Toddington, SAR Volunteer with Central Fraser Valley SAR and principal at Toddington International

Facilitating

I will be facilitating a panel on Integrating Technology in Search and Rescue, something that I write and think about extensively.

The presentation is on Sunday October 21st 2013 from 10:30 to 12:00 in Building 1119, Drill Hall.

My co-panellists are

• Rick Laing, SAR Manager at Ridge Meadows SAR, and GIS expert.
• Dr. Peter Anderson, Director of  the Telematics Research Lab, and recent recipient of the Order of BC
• Dr. Steven Brahm, Director of the SFU PolyLAB and bona fide polymath (mathematician, theoretical physicist, electronics specialist, computing and communications scientist)

It will be an interesting session with such knowledgeable people!

Cheering

And of course I will be cheering for my SAR Team’s entry into the 2013 SAR Games. As I’ve written before, I was part of a team that competed in SARScene 2007 and acieved “Top All Volunteer Team”. The competition is stiff with professional anf volunteer SAR teams from all over the world competing. This year we have an amazing group of four highly trained SAR members representing my SAR group.