Volunteer army of students uses mobile workforce and job management tool, GeoOp, to help with major earthquake clean up

After the recent 7.1 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, student Sam Johnson and his colleagues organised a volunteer army of more than 300 students, via a Facebook Event Page (now with over 3,700 members), to help clean up silt that rose up out of the ground onto streets and properties in and around Christchurch after the quake.

To help manage this process, SaaSilia, an Auckland-based software developer who created GeoOp (the mobile workforce management tool at www.geoop.com) got involved by contacting Sam and offering to supply GeoOp for free, to help co-ordinate their clean up efforts.

GeoOP is a dispatch and mobile workforce management system that is used in many countries around the world in a range of industries from freight, trades, IT support and private investigators to couriers and any other industry with a mobile workforce.

With GeoOp jobs can be added to the system and dispatched via SMS to the team or to team leaders. Using smart phones or iPhones the team can update their jobs, add notes and with the iPhone version add photos to keep a visual record. All jobs, notes and photos are updated in real time so that office-based teams can then know the status of all the jobs in the system in real time and can therefore plan and send teams to other jobs where needed. In a commercial setting, parts and invoices can also be added in the field, invoices can be sent in bulk runs to accounting and invoice packages, including Freshbooks and Xero.

After discussing clean up efforts with Sam and his team, GeoOp then contacted New Zealand mobile operators 2degrees and Vodafone and sent emails to Apple to get iPhones for Sam's team. Vodafone and 2degrees supplied data cards for laptops and data capable phones in the field. Apple generously offered three iPhone 4's, so the team could access GeoOp's advanced features.

Ben Goudie-Park, a founder of SaaSilia says, "We tried really hard to get in touch with aid agencies after the Haiti quake as we knew GeoOP could greatly assist their efforts, but we couldn't speak to the right people. It's been great to work with Sam and the Christchurch team as they easily grasped the power of GeoOP and how it could help them manage and communicate with their team. We’re happy to make GeoOP available to any organisation around the world doing humanitarian work, by offering free job credits in our system. Please visit our website at www.geoop.com for more info."

Sam and Jade from the Student Earthquake Support team said, "Thanks again for all of your help and support. We couldn't have done it without you, and your generosity has been incredible. It's been overwhelming to see people come together. The students have been great and to see businesses help too is awesome."