Built by the people who use it.

Carlos

Carlos is a serving firefighter, and he is the reason the words in this product are the right ones. The stages an incident form moves through, the order the 360 walks a building in, what a FIRECOM message says and in which sequence — none of that was designed in a meeting. It was written down off the job.

On-Scene began as the tool he wanted on his own truck. A size-up held in somebody’s head, a tactical picture that exists only in the conversation about it, a timeline reconstructed hours later from memory — each of those works right up until the moment it matters. He wanted the officer’s seat to have the same picture as everybody else at the incident, and the record of it to write itself.

Which agency and which station he serves with are deliberately not named on this site. On-Scene is not endorsed by any fire service, and implying otherwise — with a badge, a logo, or a carefully worded sentence — would be the first untrue thing on it.

Will

Will writes the code: the tablet app, the admin portal, the database and the row-level security policies that keep one agency’s incidents out of another agency’s hands, and this website. There is no offshore team and no outsourced support desk.

Two people is the whole company

That is a fair thing to weigh up when you are buying software for an emergency service, and we would rather you weighed it with the real number in front of you than found it out later. What it buys you is a short line to the person who wrote the code: a question about how command transfer is recorded gets answered by the person who decided how it is recorded, not relayed to them and back. What it does not buy you is a large vendor’s balance sheet, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The words on the screen are the words on the radio

Appliances. FIRECOM. Code 3. The 360. Sides A, B, C and D taken off the address face. The vocabulary On-Scene uses is the vocabulary spoken on an Australian fireground, so nothing on the screen has to be translated in somebody’s head at two in the morning — and a message drafted for FIRECOM is already in the form it gets read in.

Your incident data is kept in Australia

On-Scene is built to keep Australian incident data in Australia: stored and processed in Sydney, in AWS’s ap-southeast-2 region, encrypted in transit and at rest. An incident record can be read years later by people who were not there — a coroner, a court, an investigator — and which country it is sitting in is not a detail to sort out after the first job.

The Privacy Act, from the first table

An incident record names people: who was reported inside a building, which crew went in, who held command. Some of that is health information. It is personal information, it is treated as personal information, and On-Scene has been built on the basis that the Australian Privacy Principles apply to it in full — with the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme as an existing process rather than something we would write after an incident of our own.