Biosirt Blog September 2010

The National Coordination Team

Who you gonna call? BioSIRT NCT!

Stephen Pratt – Technical Officer

September marks Stephen’s first anniversary with the BioSIRT team, after transferring from the Risk Sciences program of the Bureau of Rural Sciences.

Stephen's role is mainly technical, including testing, deploying patches and upgrades and compiling a benchmarking suite for use with BioSIRT. He is also involved in the National Fruit Fly Rollout, and wrote a script to upload fruit fly trap site data directly into the BioSIRT database, ready for jurisdictions to then add trap runs and collection records. Recently, he has been developing Crystal Reports, debugging some fruit fly forms and creating new summary reports for use by jurisdictions.

Stephen is also Technical Project Manager for our soon to commence Proof of Concept project ‘Fruit fly surveillance and predictive modelling in BioSIRT’, funded by the Australian Biosecurity Intelligence Network.

Rochelle Boyce Bacon – National Fruit Fly Rollout Project Manager

Rochelle is the central point of contact for all things fruit fly! She is project manager for the national fruit fly rollout, which includes leading the working group for the National Fruit Fly Surveillance Template. Rochelle is currently revising the project plan for the project overall to ensure juridictions are fully informed about the schedule for data aggregation. It’s Rochelle’s job to coordinate and ensure that jurisdictions get the assistance and information they require and everyone is kept up-to-date about the project.

Kymme Hoadley - Training and Communications Officer

Kymme is the point of contact for all training. If your jurisdiction needs us to train administrators, if you would like assistance with user training, if you would like to host a round of training, or if you need training materials then please give Kymme a call.

The BioSIRT NCT offers a range of training to support our jurisdictions. These include Administrator Training, three modules of Advanced Administrator Training, and Train the Trainer for User training. We also have a wealth of training material that supports the delivery of BioSIRT training available on ‘GovDex’.

Peter Frecklington - National BioSIRT Administrator

‘Frecko’ is responsible for husbanding our national network of BioSIRT Administrators. Once the NCT has trained an administrator, Frecko keeps them up to date with regular emails which keep them informed of events, changes and challenges in BioSIRT administration.

Fortnightly BioSIRT Administrator Teleconferences on Tuesdays at 2 pm are open for all Administrators to attend to discuss some of these changes and challenges and provide an opportunity to ask general questions on administration.

Frecko is a key resource for the National BioSIRT Standards Committee (NBSC), he peer reviews all national template release packages for approval and currently coordinates the working groups for generic national emergency response template. He manages the national Collaboration server where these national templates are built, and the National BioSIRT Reference Library where the approved templates sit on GovDex.

Frecko also maintains the national resources for administrators on the BioSIRT community on GovDex site. These resources include training materials, notes from the BioSIRT Administrator Teleconferences, and webpages for collaboration of working groups on developing national templates and for the template change control process.

Stay tuned for more on the roles in the NCT next month….

Training

Darwin was the venue for the round of Administrator Training held at the beginning of September. The participants were from Northern Territory DoR, BioSIRT NCT, New South Wales DII, Office of the Chief Plant Protection Officer (DAFF) and ABIN. They were an enthusiastic bunch from a wide range of sectors including plant and animal health and invasive species. We look forward to seeing their progress on building templates.

Upcoming Training

The next round of Administrator training will be in early December with the venue to be announced. If you are interested in nominating for this course please email BioSIRT or call 02 6272 5837. The BioSIRT NCT will be offering the Advanced Administrator Course before the end of the calendar year. The venue is to be confirmed. If you are interested in nominating for this course or your jurisdiction would be interested in hosting, call Kymme.

The Application

Version 2.1 Coming Soon

The working group (WG) set up under the National BioSIRT Development Committee (NBDC) to review enhancements for possible inclusion in the next release of BioSIRT has reported back to the NBDC. The WG used multicriteria decision analysis to guide their recommendation. The WG identified six objectives related to an overall strategy for development of BioSIRT. Through two iterations of the process the WG considered 13 different candidate packages of enhancements each costing c. $30k. Each WG member scored the performance of each package against the agreed objectives, and assigned weights to each objective. These were combined to derive an overall decision score for each member for each package. Three alternative packages with the best overall scores will now be costed by our developer and returned to the NBDC for a final decision.

Hot off the Press!!

Contract awarded to Spatial Vision

The BioSIRT NCT concluded the tendering and contracting for procurement of the provisions of ‘BioSIRT Hosting, Support and Development Services’ resulting in the awarding of the Contract to Spatial Vision Innovations Pty Ltd.

The three-year Contract period commenced on 3 September 2010, with an option of renewal of the contracted services for another three years.

This is a great outcome and we are looking forward to a great ongoing relationship with Spatial Vision

What is going on in New South Wales?

Since the release of BioSIRT, the NSW BioSIRT Team led by Stuart McPherson (Manager, Biosecurity Information Management) ably assisted by Chris McIvor (NSW Senior BioSIRT Administrator), Steven Cudars (BioSIRT Mapping and Reports Administrator); Jo Bennett (BioSIRT Project Officer), and Julie Kable (BioSIRT Support Officer), have had a very busy time.

The team has deployed BioSIRT workspaces for Anthrax, Bee Disease Monitoring, Plant Pest Monitoring, emergencies in Swine Influenza, Sea Squirts and Myrtle Rust (photo left) and led development of templates for Varroa Mite and Australian Plague Locusts.

To help deliver these, 77 users and 12 administrators have been trained in BioSIRT. Our Independent Emergency Field Server (IEFS) was used to test-run training on the first draft of the national Myrtle Rust Surveillance template.

The NSW Team is contributing to the national effort by developing BioSIRT Administration reports, an electronic translate and load application to allow external data to be consumed by BioSIRT and generic emergency incident training materials. The NSW Team looks forward to continuing exciting and challenging times ahead.