Day 1: KEYNOTE: Embracing Personal Responsibility and Future Thinking with Watch Duty with John Mills

 

“A shared vision of reality where we can all see what’s happening allows us all to respond to the same thing accordingly.” —John Mills

 

2024 WILDFIRE LEADERSHIP SUMMIT

 

Preparing for the future of disasters requires innovative solutions that go beyond traditional approaches. By consolidating critical information and leveraging technology, communities can enhance their resilience and responsiveness when faced with unpredictable challenges. Empowering citizens with real-time, reliable data is key to navigating the complexities of disaster recovery and rebuilding.

John Mills, the CEO and co-founder of Watch Duty, is a visionary leader who has dedicated his career to improving disaster preparedness and response. Drawing from his personal experiences, he has built a nonprofit organization that harnesses the power of technology and human expertise to provide communities with the information they need during times of crisis.

Listen in as John shares how Watch Duty is revolutionizing disaster response by leveraging technology, human expertise, and a commitment to democratizing access to real-time, verified information to empower communities and emergency responders with the critical knowledge they need during times of crisis.

 

Highlights:

• 03:34 What is Watch Duty 
• 07:50 How Does It Work? 
• 11:49 Interpreting Tones 
• 16:01 A Bigger Opportunity to Make a Change 

 

Twitter:

Disaster response is being revolutionized by @watchdutyapp. Hear how CEO John Mills is leveraging tech, human expertise, and a commitment to democratizing access to real-time, verified info to empower communities during crises. #Recover #Rebuild #Reimagine #podcast #wildfire #DisasterRecovery #AfterTheFire #2024WildfireLeadershipSummit #EmergencyPreparedness #CommunityResilience #InnovativeTechnology #DataDriven #SharedSituationalAwareness #PublicSafety #WildfireManagement #DisasterRecovery #CrisisManagement

 

Quotes:

00:45 “My way of coping is by being productive.” —John Mills

07:23 “There are people who are sensationalizing what is happening, which is what happens on the news, and it does not help anybody actually plan.” —John Mills

15:20 “We have the opportunity to make a difference in the fire scenes. There’s a huge opportunity for us to make an even bigger difference than we thought.” —John Mills 

17:11 “A shared vision of reality where we can all see what’s happening allows us all to respond to the same thing accordingly.” —John Mills

 

Meet John Mills, CEO and Co-Founder of Watch Duty

John Clarke Mills is the CEO and co-founder of Watch Duty, a cutting-edge disaster intelligence platform that provides real-time wildfire tracking and updates. Launched in August 2021, Watch Duty leverages advanced technology to enhance public safety by delivering timely and accurate information to users in fire-prone areas.

With a background in software engineering, John previously co-founded Zenput, a company specializing in operations execution software. His expertise in technology and his commitment to community safety have driven the success of Watch Duty. Under his leadership, the platform has become an essential tool for residents and emergency responders alike, helping to mitigate the impact of wildfires and save lives.

John’s innovative approach and dedication to using technology for the greater good continue to inspire and protect communities vulnerable to natural disasters.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnclarkemills/ 

Connect with Watch Duty:

• Website: https://www.watchduty.org/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/watchdutyapp 
• X: https://twitter.com/watchdutyapp 
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/watchdutyapp/ 
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/watch-duty/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@watchdutyapp  

 

Transcription:

John Mills: So I’m John Mills. I’m the CEO and Co-founder of Watch duty.org and we’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit started here in Sonoma County. I lived through a couple of near misses, almost lost the ranch that I worked very hard to build and acquire over all these years, and then this sent me on this personal journey to go do something like a lot of you do in this room. A lot of our ideas are born out of fire, in pain, and my way of coping is by being productive. So this is my story. So our larger mission is actually not about lot of learn. It’s going to begin here, but it’s not going to end here. When you think about fires and disaster, you think about, well, not you. I think about geospatial problems. I need to go see people need to move. Something bad is going to happen if I stay where I am. And this is true for many different types of disaster. 

Today, we’re going to talk about fire, but there’s a very clear reason why fire is not the name of the company, because we knew at the beginning where we’re going to go. So, kind of riffing on what Jennifer was saying, this is what currently happens today. We’re on social media using the government websites, using NIFC, using Irwin, WildCAD, all these other sources that are around trying to get information from our PA’s, our politicians, whomever. And really we find, and I think Jennifer kind of summed this up best, is that there’s people who make it their livelihood to listen to the radio scanners and relay credible information through our application. And so we’ll get to the app in a second, but that’s what I found out. And I lived through the Walbridge fire. I’m sure many of you here have been through that fire in Sonoma County, but I found these people to help me through my process. Some of them were not even in America. It was the strangest thing in the world to watch citizens from around the world help solve this really large problem. So different platforms, I kind of touched on that again. It ends up usually being social media or next solar, other types of alerting systems, and they kind of give you a little bit of piecemeal of story about what’s happening, but they’re not really painting a picture for you. They’re actually just telling you you’ve been given the golden ticket to GTFL, get the hell out of here. That’s how we lived for quite some time. And so the issue is this, is that even in the fire service and citizens, it’s not even the distributed you’re looking at different websites, you’re trying to figure out where to go, and all hours of the night, your heart is racing. You smell smoke. Sorry if I’m triggering anyone here, but this is the crap shoot that I lived through several times. And then finally, the last one is there’s no sense of shared vision for what’s happening. We all can’t see to same anything, and I’m gonna tell you a story of why that matters and how this affects the fire service as well. But we all see the same thing, the same way that sports used to be reported on. We’d hear NBC, ABC, CBS, all seen the balls hit the left field, caught by so and so, thrown out of firsties out, there was no dispute. Now it’s, I think it’s this zone. It’s that zone. This sheriff says this, this county says that, and we have no idea what’s going on in like, one shared vision of what’s actually happening in reality. 

So what is Watch duty? Watch duty consolidates all of those features into one place. I’m not going to read this list, but all the things that you need to deal with to live through a fire, or live here in Sonoma County for that matter, or most of the American West now, including Alaska and Hawaii, consolidated in one place, all this information is publicly available. It is free. We are a nonprofit. We do have extra services. We will sell you, if you donate, you get some extra cool features, like the little helicopters and tankers and stuff spinning. But it is our job to have a free application that does not require an email, does not require a phone number. We don’t collect any information. There is no sign up. That’s how we got so big, trying to remove all the barriers and making this easy to use, unlike Nixels and Code Reds and all these other products that are out in the market that are bought by different municipalities. \

So currently, we’re in 13 states of the West. We’re now at 2.6 million users. We onboarded 200,000 yesterday. Southern California is burning, unfortunately, and so today’s been a distracting day for me, given what is happening across our coverage area, some of you from Oregon, Washington, it’s also getting hit hard, and same with Idaho. Let me tell you more about how this all really works. Here’s a short video.

Watch Duty video  

A 911 dispatch center receives a call about a vegetation fire. Our automated monitoring system hears that 911 dispatch and alerts our team in our internal messaging tool, Slack. All available Watch Duty report in that region begin monitoring their radio scanners, wildfire cameras, satellites and other public sources such as official announcements from law enforcement and fire services. The team vets all available information and waits for on scene personnel to give an official report on conditions. If there is a threat to life or property, we will notify the affected public via the Watch Duty app. Our reporters follow a strict code of conduct when notifying the public. Reporters will continually monitor the incident and update the public along the way until the fire is extinguished or no longer a threat to life or property, stay safe from wildfires when seconds count, download the free Watch Duty app today.

John Mills: So want to tell you a little bit more about these temporary human beings who do this work. We have 150 probably more now, 175 people doing this work. About seven of our analysts are paid. These are paid human beings who work with us. We have an incredible group of men and women who do this for a living. Many of them have spent decades doing this type of work, listening to fires, fighting fires, California fire scanner lives in New Zealand. He’s the most famous radio operator on the planet. He’s a highest paid reporter, currently. He can probably hear five things at once and pick the right thing out. He’s like no dispatcher we’ve ever, ever seen. And this man has never even set foot in California, and he’s been doing this for about eight years now. The other two men, obviously, you can see their careers here, but these people are similar to some of the folks I listened to during my fires. 

There are these human beings who retired, but they have the radio scanner on the background. It’s always chirping. They can I’m sure that we have many people shaking their heads here hearing this, and they end up finding a second life in your career in the fire service by doing this work. And they’re always doing it anyway. He was just on Facebook and Twitter, and they have a much bigger audience now doing what we do in Watch Duty. So these people, again, are not ordinary citizens. You can probably just go through one by one here. They obviously have backgrounds in this. They study our manuals. We have exemplary training. We have yearly retraining. We have tons of collaborative opportunities from the work learn, and then, most importantly, everyone has a background check. So this is not a renegade operation done by human beings who shouldn’t be here, which happens on Twitter. There are people who are sensationalizing what is happening, which is what happens on the news, and it does not help anybody actually plan and common cooler heads prevail when we do the right thing in the way that we do it. 

So let me tell you how this weird thing works. What we really do is we take it from military operators do something, what’s called signals intelligence processing, and there’s human beings who are very good at analyzing and hearing this in real time, just like the scanners do, right? And so we have this multimodal problem of different sources coming in into our system, and we all need to parse and hear in real time. I’ve hit it two more times. So here are the main sources that you guys probably know, a lot of you do, at least on the mainland, there’s camera networks, there’s the government sites, there’s CHP, there’s WildCAD, there’s PulsePoint, there’s all of these different ways that we’re all being signaled that there’s a vegetation fire somewhere. But again, really, the big one comes from Broadcastify. And Broadcastify is how we listen to police and fire scanners on the internet. We’ll come more into that in a second, because a lot of us are remote, and some of us do live in the counties, and you can put an antenna in your roof and you can hear it all. But for example, our man in New Zealand has never even been to Australia before. So how does he do this? Well, we do this through Broadcastify, and knows that we build, and I’ll explain that in a second. 

So what’s happening is we’re constantly parsing and scanning information with machines and humans and feeding it into our Slack channel. So Slack is split up. Slack is a messaging thing, like teams, you guys aren’t aware, or chat whatever. And each region, like Cal Fire, has different regions. We have different regions that we feed information that comes into. So we’ll hear the tanker took off from this airport. It’s at this lat long that goes in this channel. Someone just said vegetation fire on the radio came off of this radio tower. They must be here. It goes to that channel. And so all this information is sent in one place where a group of people can all hear this at the same time and collaborate in the same time, right? So we’re real time editing as this is actually unfolding. And the next part is, there’s the app, they go one more time. And then there’s all sorts of other enrichment that we’re using, including AI, I’ll talk a little bit about how we do that, but there’s a lot of other sources that all come together to make this a reality, to see the truth right. And that’s the hardest part for us. We’re trying to find the truth. And so, you know, some officials might think we’re hasty, but we’re just faster. He’s not hasty, because we’ll hear something and might be 15 or 50. Well, we’re going to sit on that. We’re going to wait for the replay air attacks about to be overhead. We’re not going to send anything out. 

So we’re extremely diligent about what we do, because when we start making mistakes, we start to erode trust, and then we start to erode what we had built. So we’re gonna get a little geeky for a second. I’m a little too tired to be sassy, unfortunately, although she introduced me as such. So what you’re seeing on the left is a Broadcastify radio node, and Reddit really is just a little tiny computer and a bunch of software to find radios. And this is all available on the internet, and our plans are open source, and we support them everywhere. What they do is we find radio dead zones, if you look here on the right very special modeling software that we get from Google, where we’re able to map and categorize every single radio repeater and antenna in the American West, find out its propagation of radio frequencies, and actually deploy this in the dead zone where no one can hear anything. And what was really scary is that we found out that we had fire departments and OES and DEMS actually calling us because they’re using Broadcastify. I would have assumed that the people who are defending us have everything they need, well they don’t, unfortunately, and that’s where the story is going to end. But what happened here is that we found all these areas where OES, DEMS need this, as well as the firefighters themselves, are getting called from out of area. 

So the men here who have, you know, badges on, they don’t need it for Sonoma County, right? Like, we just turn on the radio, but you’re getting called in three counties over. How do I know what’s going on? Well, now you have Watch Duty, and you also have the ability to now listen remotely on the way to your incident that you’re reporting to. And so before we hit play, I’m going to describe something interesting that the fire folks probably know. But do you guys know what a tone out is for the firehouse, fire departments? Anyone tone outs, fire folks? Some nod or hands up. Greg, here is a firefighter. Thank you, Shay, for fighting fire and knowing what that is. So tone outs are the way that the fire department and other services have worked for a very long time. What they do is they use radios to transmit digital signals. So think about when you press the button on a phone, you hear those noises. Those are called DTMF tones. Those tones are related to a piece of fire equipment, apparatus, air support, battalion chief, doesn’t matter. And each little region across the American West has their different idea of what those DTMF tones mean. So the tone might mean a dozer over here, or it might be a strike team over there. And the problem is is that across the fire service, they’ve never really had to know before what everyone’s tones are. They’re just like things you hear on the radio, right? So you press play, you’re going to hear a live transmission, and what’s happening on the other side. 

So what’s happening is that we’ve built infrastructure to parse every piece of radio transmission that broadcast to the American West, categorize it all, and then figure out what each of those tones mean. So now in areas where Pulse Point and other things don’t exist, we know the minute it happens that someone’s ordering equipment somewhere, and then we’re able to go, react and respond faster than anyone else is able to parse. I mean, on top of that, we do use some modern things as well. We are using AI to help us not only parse some of the radio transmissions, but we also use it to listen to PIL information sources. So we get lots of people mailing us PDFs, scraping things from Facebook and Twitter and all these places. And that also funnels into our pipeline. And now we say that Sheriff’s Department put out this thing in this area. It gets funneled into our right Slack channel, and now everybody knows what’s happening. Before, like myself and Jennifer, or wherever she went, you’re spending all night trying to find all this as a human being. The amount of human hours spent doing this is just ridiculous. And this happens everywhere across the West because there’s no information about this. And so we’ve consolidated this into one place where not only we can hear it, but now you guys can hear it. 

So here’s an example of a line fire yesterday. We’re the only people in the world to be able to do this, satellite hotspots, evacuation zones, tankers, everything that’s going on is in one place now, including the wildfire cameras that we just partnered with alert California alert West, and they just deployed in Hawaii. They invited us to come down there. So I’m very excited to come see the beautiful state. So what’s happened is we built this for our neighbors, our community members, citizens around us. What we didn’t understand is that the fire service was going to start using this actively, and that’s the part that really changed the mission of this company. Brian Fennessy is one of the most famous firefighters in California, in my opinion. He’s the reason we fly fires of night. He’s the reason we have nighttime fires planes flying infrared missions over the fires. This man emailed me out of the blue and send this to me. And I looked him up, and I was like, is this, are you kidding me? Who is this guy? Well, now he’s in our advisory board, but this man came out of the blue and told me that the men and women who are responding in incidents have more information than ever had before. My hair stands up thinking about it not only angers me, it also excites me that we have opportunity to make a difference in the fire seams. And so you go through some of the next ones, you’ll see all of a sudden we start having all of these sheriffs using our information and sharing it. You can just go through them slowly, locals. We have the next one is our governor of Colorado. Who else, they were in the background for the park fire. The Idaho public lands now uses our map instead of theirs, and we run their fire service mapping for their whole entire state. Butte County Sheriff again, Park fire, there’s probably some more in here. I forget what I whipped in here for service in the organization. It’s in their pockets. It’s in their hands, and they’ve started to actually share it with the rest of the world. 

So this is where it starts to get interesting for me as an entrepreneur and someone who builds these types of things. But what we found out is that there’s a huge opportunity for us to make an even bigger difference than we thought. So if you go through the next slides, you can just list them. A little geeky for some but essentially, we built another set of donation tiers. So essentially, we operate much like a museum. Well, I’m guessing museum isn’t free, but we have a free model everyone, download it, use it. I hope you don’t need it. I’m sorry when it goes off, but I’m glad it’s there for you. If you pay $25 a year, you get some extra features, and if you pay a $99 a year, you get all the features here. This launched a week ago. We’ve sold 2000 seats in one week with no outbound and now we are talking with every telco, every energy company in the American West, from Idaho Power to PGE to T Mobile, Verizon, anyone with men, women, trucks and equipment out in the field, is actually using this actively, and it’s starting to really make a difference in the way that they respond and we respond to fires. Because what I said earlier is something that I still believe, is that a shared vision of reality, we can all see what’s happening, that allows us all to respond to the same thing accordingly, not cordoning off information to different people who don’t get to see this because they’re not privileged enough, or you’re a volunteer firefighter, right? And you never get access to any of this. And so now, by democratizing this and giving this away, we have to charge for this, because we have services to pay extraordinarily cheap. Now we’re going up against on accident, Benza and many other companies who are trying to sell this for a lot more money, and we’re just not going to have it, so we’re going to build something better. 

The next slide is our new thing that we’re building. Because what we thought would happen, that’s the last one there. We thought that the governments we want our API, which is our data for the nerds in the room, access to that, because they want to build it into their information systems, usually, GIS, thank you, ESRI, but they don’t like their current tools, it turns out. And so now the first feature is the one that they all ask about, because they actually want to embed their data in our product. So knowing all this, everything has changed. The way this company operates is not just about us in the room anymore. It’s about the people that serve us, and that’s our new mission, and that’s what I’m here to tell you guys about. I’d love to talk to you more after if you have any questions, thoughts or concerns, my email is the next one. Thank you all. Much appreciated.