FIELDOPS Guide
Foundations · 01

Concepts

Three ideas make up the whole app. Once these click, everything else is just details.

The Three Layers

1
Top Level

Department

Your organization. A fire department, a drone company, a SAR team, a recovery business. Each department has its own subdomain, its own team, its own settings. You don't see other departments and they don't see you.

2
Mid Level

Operation

An individual mission — a fire, a search, a recovery, a tactical op. A department can have many operations active at once. Each one has its own map, its own pins, its own team roster, and its own settings.

3
Ground Level

Pins

The actual content — a marker on a map with a location, a label, a type, and optionally notes or photos. Every pin belongs to one operation. Pins are what your team drops to communicate what's happening and where.

How They Relate

A department contains operations. An operation contains pins. Users belong to a department, and from there they can access operations within that department. Nothing crosses department boundaries — if you need to share with another department, that's a separate flow (covered in Sharing & Access, v03c).

Terminology Notes

A few things to know so the rest of the Guide makes sense:

  • "Operation" is what the app calls individual missions. You'll see buttons like + New Operation and section headers that say OPERATIONS.
  • "Projects screen" is the tab name for the main list of operations. The tab says "Projects" but what's listed on it are operations.
  • "Project" and "Operation" are used somewhat interchangeably in older parts of the app — same thing, different name.
  • "Department" is the top-level tenant. Sometimes also called "site" in settings labels.
Why the terminology is inconsistent

FieldOps evolved from a project management tool (hence "project") into an incident response platform (hence "operation"). The names overlap because it's still the same data model — a container that holds pins and people and settings. If you see one term, mentally substitute the other and you'll be right.

What Goes Where

Things configured at the Department level (shared by all operations):

  • Site Title (department name shown in the topbar)
  • App Icon (emoji shown in the topbar)
  • Access PINs (Admin, User, Viewer PINs for department-wide access)
  • Team Roster (named members with unique PINs)
  • Drone Roster (drones available to assign to operations)
  • Pilot Profile and Department Info (used for waivers and reports)
  • Which pin types are enabled
  • Department SOG (standard operating guidelines document)

Things configured at the Operation level (per-mission):

  • Operation name
  • On-Scene Personnel (who's actually there for this specific op)
  • Active Drones (which drones are deployed for this op)
  • Pre-Flight Checklist state
  • Access Control (per-operation PIN overrides, assigned roster members, project users)
  • Parcel permissions (granted/denied/not-contacted status per property)
  • All the pins dropped on the map

As a rule of thumb: if it's information about your organization, it lives at the department level. If it's information about this specific mission, it lives at the operation level.

One More Thing — Access Is PIN-Based

There are no usernames or passwords in FieldOps. Access is controlled by PINs:

  • Each department has Admin, User, and Viewer PINs
  • Named roster members get their own unique PINs that identify them on pins and reports
  • Temporary PINs can be issued for mutual aid or short-term access
  • Per-operation PINs override department-level PINs when set

Full detail on this is in User Management (v03b) and Sharing & Access (v03c).

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Up Next
Departments — what a department is and how to set one up