One of our goals in 2017 is to provide our Field Investigators and staff with the tools and resources they need to maintain the highest level of proficiency and professionalism in the UFO field. To this end, I am pleased to update you on three exciting projects now under active development in MUFON.
The first is the MUFON Anomaly Research and Reporting System (MARRS) which will soon begin archiving historical resources in preparation for beta testing with the plan to go live later this summer. This global database will provide users with unprecedented levels of access to historical resources such as documents, articles, witness reports, journals, media, etc. And will include reports from the very beginning of MUFON in 1969 when we were first founded, as well as other files MUFON has like the Leonard Stringfield (Redacted as appropriate) files and more. The plan will be for MARRS to become a valuable research tool for investigators, researchers, and the scientific community at large when it comes to studying and researching the UFO subject.
A second project is our Case Management System (CMS) which is the backbone of our UFO witness reporting system. CMS is now more than 10 years old, and running on software that is in need of major updating. The good news is that we have begun the redesign of CMS in order to improve usability, security, and integration with our other in-house systems such as MARRS and NEON, our new membership system. These improvements will be important to the future of UFO research and reporting. The plan is to model it on the current CMS system with lots of new software and usability updates.
And finally, the plan is to put a new front-end on CMS and our Report a UFO (RaUFO) sighting form to address the need for a more user-friendly witness reporting submission process. This new Report a UFO responsive mobile app will simplify the reporting process, increase the number of witness reports by making it easier to report a sighting, and should reduce the time from sighting to reporting because of its ease of use. I have asked Ken St. John to be the project leader on these three initiatives and he has graciously agreed. If you’d like to help out, or learn more you may reach Ken at dot@mufon.com. ∆
The first is the MUFON Anomaly Research and Reporting System (MARRS) which will soon begin archiving historical resources in preparation for beta testing with the plan to go live later this summer. This global database will provide users with unprecedented levels of access to historical resources such as documents, articles, witness reports, journals, media, etc. And will include reports from the very beginning of MUFON in 1969 when we were first founded, as well as other files MUFON has like the Leonard Stringfield (Redacted as appropriate) files and more. The plan will be for MARRS to become a valuable research tool for investigators, researchers, and the scientific community at large when it comes to studying and researching the UFO subject.
A second project is our Case Management System (CMS) which is the backbone of our UFO witness reporting system. CMS is now more than 10 years old, and running on software that is in need of major updating. The good news is that we have begun the redesign of CMS in order to improve usability, security, and integration with our other in-house systems such as MARRS and NEON, our new membership system. These improvements will be important to the future of UFO research and reporting. The plan is to model it on the current CMS system with lots of new software and usability updates.
And finally, the plan is to put a new front-end on CMS and our Report a UFO (RaUFO) sighting form to address the need for a more user-friendly witness reporting submission process. This new Report a UFO responsive mobile app will simplify the reporting process, increase the number of witness reports by making it easier to report a sighting, and should reduce the time from sighting to reporting because of its ease of use. I have asked Ken St. John to be the project leader on these three initiatives and he has graciously agreed. If you’d like to help out, or learn more you may reach Ken at dot@mufon.com. ∆
