During the SSF and Crisis Mapping response to the Haiti Earthquake in 2010, many requests for help and assistance were sent via email and other means. It was hard for multiple people to know who had taken responsibility for collecting this information, and assigning task(s) that may result from this incoming information. For example, numerous emails and links to documents containing information to be imported were provided, but not system was able to capture and track the assignment of the entry of this information.

Broadly, this is a two-stage process:

1. Recording of incoming messages in a message log
2. Management of actions/tasks generated by human review of a message

In this brief spec, these have been broken out into two different modules as the message log may be utilised to produce information in other modules - such as situation reporting. There is also a third module that may come into play - a document library for recording incoming attachments, e.g. Situation Reports from other organistions.

The concept of the message log module is just to capture incoming information and messages that will later be reviewed and may result in the creation of further actions or derivative information. This is a common tool in emergency management with a simple paper log to track incoming messages. The message log is very much like a blog with messages listed in reverse chronological order with the newest at the top.

Key information to capture:

• DateTime - if blank, time of submission to database, otherwise allow user to enter time (e.g. may want to manually enter time original email or phone call was received)
• Creator - who created the message in the system
• To - who the message was originally to, at a minimum one person or organisation, but may need to support multiple recipients
• From - the person or organisation the email was from
• Status - Normal or Urgent (may want more, but initially a means to flag certain messages as urgent will be useful)
• Message - textblog or whatever, may need to quite large bodies of text, e.g. cut-and-paste email

Options:

• AJAX update to show new messages without reloading page
• AJAX update to highlight message marked as urgent (e.g. highlight background light red or similar)
• When creating a message it would be useful to allow uploading a document to a document library module (not yet developed) and then linking that back to the original message it was sourced from. This would allow two-way linking e.g. from message to document, or document to message