We Won the Digital Jersey Hackathon.

On 26th September 2014 Craig Gallen and Mark Wharton joined forty developers huddled over their screens for 48 hours at the Jersey Digital Hub for the first ever Jersey Hackathon.

Much to our surprise, we won the prize for the best App; Open Alert, a tool for on site workers based upon OpenNMS.

Open Alert a Man on Site Application

The Open Alert ‘Man on Site’ App combined with OpenNMS provides a simple service to check on the health and safety of people working alone on site. This could be a useful feature where OpenNMS is used by a Service Provider to manage a distributed network and there are often travelling workers working alone on remote sites. In these cases it is usual for the work to report in to the Network Operations Center (NOC) on a regular basis that they are OK. Having their status automatically tracked and escalated alongside other network issues could really help.

The basic application could have other uses though to report the status of other lone workers such as health visitors or security guards etc. In this case, OpenNMS would simply be being used as a platform to give a display of the workers location on site and their status. (It wouldn’t be managing a network).

Further more the basic service could be extended to gather statistics from the Android app other than just it’s location. This would provide the basic framework to collect metrics from a device as it travels around.