Hello, I’m Benjamin Borowski. I’m an artist, educator, and co-founder of the Notion Mastery program. I’m also a Notion Ambassador and one of the first Notion Consultants.
I also happen to be a Lieutenant at the Halfmoon Bay Volunteer Fire Department (that’s the one in Canada, not the one south of San Francisco).
And, of course, because I’m a Notion nerd, yeah, we use Notion at our fire department.
Our single-page HBVFD dashboard orients members in the department and provides a simple interface to fire department resources. Because no one but me is a Notion expert, we avoid complex relations as much as possible.
Members can view our Roster, find Training + Studies resources, view our Run Cards which determine the run order of our apparatus based on the event types, and more. Officers use the Burn Permits database when on duty in cases of burning complaints.
We use Notion to organize the roster into duty crews, with a helmet-matching color hierarchy (white hats ⇒ chiefs, red ⇒ officers, yellow ⇒ firefighters, blue ⇒ candidates) using the conditional color and sub-items features in databases.
We use database automations to send webhooks to an simple external script which figures out who's on duty for a given period, and sends text messages and Slack notifications to those folks. We use Notion API calls to further look up data in the Roster database which contains the associated Slack UIDs and phone numbers.
When your lil volunteer dept. can't afford the big guy's software, you build your own version of an event notification system with a touch of automation and a splash of email parsing.
Members can 👍 an event dispatch to capture their attendance in Notion.
Databases to learn friction-loss calculations with formulas based on the length and diameters of the hoses you use. Notion makes education interactive.
Repositories of knowledge and flash cards to support recruits’ learning goals.