OSTicket – Ticketing

For many years hams in Minnesota have supported outdoor sporting events- marathons, ski races and charity bike rides. These regularly have “missing persons” – such as family members asking about a participant who has not finished the race on time. Are they injured or in a medical tent or the hospital?

If you are tracking injured athletes, we usually have a copy of our database, Trivnetdb, and we can look up the name or bib number and find up to the second status if available. The idea is hams report in what they see, we type it in.

This problem gets harder if the missing person is a spectator- they are not in a system anywhere. Recently, the Twin Cities in Motion folks told me they had up to nine missing person “links” reports in a recent large event. These cases took up lots of top leadership time during the peak hours of a busy race.

They wanted two things- visibility and timed escalation. So if a child or parent goes missing, they want to notify responsible parties in the area, but not everyone. And after say ten minutes, they wanted more levels of support (i.e. law enforcement) to be engaged.

Tickets aka Service Desk (see ITIL(r)) are good for this. You open a missing persons ticket, and let authorized persons see the open ticket page/report. The obvious question- how many lost people reports do we have open? Easy. Tickets have an owner – maybe the Race Operations Center Manager. They can be re-assigned – maybe the Incident Commander.

Collaboration tools like HSIN (Homeland Security Information Network) can be used to share a system report page to public safety officials or visa versa to event staff and volunteers. Many ticketing systems have an automatric escalation feature. The package can be used to track on course adverse events or down runners also. There is minimal programming per se.

I found OSTicket out there – it has a free version and also a paid cloud version. It needs a database, web server and PHP. I put it on a Windows 11 tiny laptop- it likes Linux also. The directions were not trivial but I got it going.

At TCM 2023 we spun up a cloud version (30 day trial) and had it ready to go up HSIN. The race did get cancelled due to heat. Another use case came up- SAG bus dispatching.