D4H Whiteboard

The D4H whiteboard is a great way to get information out to the members of your organization. Some might not check email, and maybe you don’t wish to “spam” by sending to all, but adding a whiteboard message gets to people who log in to D4H on a regular basis. (We used it recently to remind about our annual SCBA mask fit testing.)

Adding a message (marked important or not) is a great way to get to the top of the D4H dashboard:

When we don’t have more pressing postings to make, we’ve chosen to offer quiz questions on our whiteboard as a fun way to keep content fresh in mind, and keep our membership engaged. We (with we being Coal Creek Canyon Fire Rescue) provide response for structure fire, wildland fire, rescue (including automobile), medical (as a BLS agency), hazardous materials, and (as we learned in 2013) other incidents, such as floods. We also assist with search and rescue (having mountainous state parks in our district.) We have a lot to remember, and quizzes are a good way to keep things top of mind.

We used a spreadsheet to gather questions and a simple ruby script (run automatically daily against the D4H APIs) to post the questions and answers. The script takes the day of the year and combines that with the number of quiz questions to pick today’s quiz question and yesterday’s answer, and posts both.

 #
 #  A snippet of the script, to add a whiteboard entry...
 #
 wuri = URI('https://api.d4h.org/v2/team/whiteboard')
 areq = Net::HTTP::Post.new(wuri)
 areq['Authorization'] = 'Bearer ___________'
 
 areq.set_form_data({'text' => formatted_question, 'enddate' => question_days_ahead_formatted}, '&')
        
 ares = Net::HTTP.start(wuri.hostname, 
                   wuri.port, 
                   :use_ssl => true) {|http|
   http.request(areq)
 }

You can view the Whiteboard in D4H’s MyD4H mobile application. Additionally, here is how the Whiteboard looks in Response Utilities for D4H…