The SIMS Portal was designed to improve how we as a network learn from our shared experiences in information management. There are a number of features that help facilitate that process, including collecting feedback at the end of a Remote Supporter’s assignment, collecting real-time feedback from the SIMS Remote Coordinator, and documenting our work through this learn-sims.org site.
Remote Supporter Learning Reviews
Each Remote Supporter can access a feedback form from their assignment record. These forms serve as a mechanism to capture people’s overall satisfaction with their support and recommendations for how we can improve how we engage with remote volunteers.
These surveys are semi anonymous; information people share is not directly attributable to them to general observers, but can be traced back by Portal Administrators with unlimited permission sets. However, they will not access this data unless there is a specific reason to, such as to address a serious complaint.
A high-level summary of all reviews submitted for a given emergency will become visible once there is a minimum number of records—that threshold is currently set to three reviews. This is to ensure that there is enough data so as to provide a sufficient level of anonymity for any end users viewing it.
SIMS Remote Coordinator Operation Reviews
While Remote Supporters are encouraged to provide their feedback at the end of their assignment and are asked general questions, the SIMS Remote Coordinator is granted the ability to provide more targeted feedback. Thanks to their activation-wide perspective and proximity to SIMS doctrine, they are best placed to register specific observations about our processes and products for later consideration.
SIMS Remote Coordinators can access this form from the emergency page. The form asks them to flag specific issues, either positive, negative, or neutral, and to optionally recommend how to address or operationalize the observation.
These records are initially placed into a queue for SIMS Portal Administrators to review jointly with a small governance committee on a periodic basis. Recommendations may end up dictating changes to doctrine, standard operating procedures, product templates, and guidance.
To save a new record:
- Navigate to the relevant emergency page in the SIMS Portal;
- If assigned as a SIMS Remote Coordinator for the event, an link labeled “Review Operation” will be visible—click it;
- Fill in the title, type, category, and description;
- (Optional) If you have any recommendations on how to address what you’ve observed, include them in the Recommendation box
Learning Portal
You’re reading this on the SIMS Learning Portal, a WordPress-powered platform for sharing documentation, resources, guides, and walkthroughs. Anyone from the SIMS network can draft documents here, but must first be granted access with an account. To do so, reach out to a member of the SIMS Portal administration team.
We’ve built a way to connect guides to specific portfolio products on the SIMS Portal. Say you solved a fun challenge as part of a response activation, and you want to not only share the final product, but walk others through your process of creating it. After you post the product there, view it and grab the integer at the end of the URL. In the example below, that would mean grabbing the number 5.
On the WordPress page that you draft the article in, scroll all the way to the bottom of the right-hand pane and look for the section called “SIMS Portal Integration”, and paste that number there to establish the linkage. Learn more about creating guides.