What I’m building with Groundtruth 911

I’ve been building Groundtruth 911 faster than I’ve been able to explain it. I've had tools, infographics, questions, and conversations, with much of the connection between them still living in my head. The new website gives folks a way in.

I did not begin with an org chart or funding. I kept following problems. Through doing the work, I got clearer about what I was trying to build and what it would take to sustain it.

After nearly a decade in public safety technology and 911, I have questions that don’t fit neatly inside a product offering. How does a system full of people doing their individual jobs still produce an outcome nobody intended? Where does the responsibility go when a problem crosses a boundary? What happens to the knowledge held by the person who has been maintaining that data for years?

Groundtruth is an independent public-safety practice organized around those kinds of questions. I look at how a system is represented, examine what happens in reality, and build, investigate, or document something useful where the two diverge.

The work I most want you to see

Groundtruth Validation Workbench is the central technical effort: a local NG9-1-1 GIS validation tool I’m developing around traceable findings, human review, and recorded decisions.

If this isn’t your field, GIS is the map and data work underneath these systems. A check can flag something that needs attention. A person still has to understand the finding and decide what to do.

Consider an address point flagged outside a service boundary. Someone might investigate the point, question the boundary, or document a reason for leaving the data as-is. The next person should understand that decision without having to track down whoever made it.

That requirement shapes the Workbench. The finding stays connected to its source record. Its severity and its review status are separate. Marking something reviewed preserves the finding and its history. A new occurrence can come back for review.

Approved Local Conventions give practitioners an explicit way to record a local convention for the tool to recognize. Approval is a human decision. It can be inspected and revoked, and any change needs fresh consideration. The underlying standards issue remains visible.

The website walks through the check families and illustrates how a finding moves through review. The data stays local. The tool advises. The human decides. I want that principle to be visible in how the software behaves.

Something you can use now

Groundtruth Schema Bridge is the free public-beta ArcGIS Pro toolbox you may have seen under its earlier name, the NENA Schema Converter. It moves GIS data between supported NENA schema versions, creating new outputs with logs and a conversion manifest.

It gives people a useful way to try something I’ve built. Conversion and validation answer different questions, which is why Schema Bridge and Validation Workbench have separate jobs.

It also provides a place for the knowledge people bring to the work. The Aggregation Point, or TAP, is the vendor-neutral NG9-1-1 practitioner community within Groundtruth. Its existing forum keeps its own identity and community protections. People can ask questions and share what they know across organizations and jurisdictions.

Groundtruth’s Public Record is where the practice’s updates, findings, and technical explanations will live as the work develops.

What independence makes possible

I’m independent on purpose.

I want room to follow a question even when the answer is inconvenient, and to build for the people actually responsible for these systems. Respect for those people needs to survive the funding arrangement, the product decision, and the deadline.

The practical part still has to work. Focused development takes time, and contributors deserve to be paid. I’m working toward support that makes both possible while keeping the practice's purpose intact.

The Workbench is where I most want to put that support. If you maintain 911 GIS data, come look at what I’m building. If you can help create focused development time or support paid technical review, let’s talk about a specific piece of the work.