How Crowd works
Crowd tracks the things your team responds to during an event and keeps everyone working off the same picture. This page explains the shape of it, so the rest of the guides have somewhere to hang.
The short version
Something happens. It gets into Crowd as an incident. A dispatcher (or the responder themselves) puts the right person on it. That person works it and updates the status as they go. When it's done, it's closed, and the whole thing stays on the record. Every dispatcher sees the same board the entire time, and it updates as things change.
Before the event
An administrator sets up the roster: who's on the team, their role (what they're allowed to do), and their call sign. People sign in, set a password, and turn on two-factor if your organization requires it. At shift start, staff mark themselves on duty so dispatch knows who's available.
See Administration for the setup side, and Signing in & security for accounts.
Where reports come from
An incident can start three ways:
- A dispatcher creates it. Someone calls it in over the radio or walks up to the desk, and a dispatcher logs it in Polaris.
- An attendee texts in. You publish a phone number. When an attendee texts it, the message shows up in Crowd as a conversation. A dispatcher can reply, and turn it into an incident if it needs a response.
- A responder picks it up in the field. A responder who comes across something can open Voyager and start it themselves.
The life of an incident
Each incident carries a priority (P1 emergency down to P4 low), a category (medical, theft, disturbance, and so on), and a status that moves as work happens:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| New | Logged, nobody on it yet. |
| Dispatched | Someone's been assigned. (Assigning a New incident moves it here automatically.) |
| In progress | The responder is working it. |
| Resolved | Handled; pending close-out. |
| Closed | Done and on the record. (Or Cancelled if it turned out to be nothing.) |
While an incident is new and unowned, Crowd runs an acknowledgement clock on it, sized to the priority. If nobody picks it up in time, it starts to stand out so it doesn't slip. Assigning someone, or a responder claiming it, acknowledges it and gets it moving.
Anyone reading the board can tell an incident's stage from its traffic light: red means nobody's on it yet, amber means someone's handling it, green means it's cleared. Priority is shown separately, as the P-badge.
Getting the right person on it
A dispatcher assigns a lead and can add more responders to a call. Assigned people get notified — a push on their phone in Voyager, and a text if they have a number on file. For things the whole room should hear, a dispatcher can send a tone, which plays a chime and reads the call out loud on the Aurora displays.
Medical calls
Medical incidents can carry a Patient Care Report (PCR) with the clinical detail. Because PCRs hold protected health information, they're locked down more tightly than the rest of Crowd: only people connected to the call (or medical oversight) can open one. In a real emergency, someone with the break-glass permission can force access, which gets logged and flagged to supervisors. There's more on this in the Polaris and Voyager guides.
Who's looking at what
- Dispatch works the board in Polaris (the desktop app, or Polaris Web in a browser).
- Responders work their calls in Voyager on their phones, including offline in dead zones.
- A standby room or command post can put up the Aurora screens so people hear tones and watch the board without a keyboard.
It's all one system. A status change a responder makes on their phone shows up on the dispatch board within moments, and the other way around.
After the event
Every incident keeps its full history — who did what and when, the notes, the messages, the response times. That record is there for your debrief, and the audit log separately tracks security events like logins, role changes, and break-glass use.