Beacon

Beacon is the part of the VOICE software that volunteers use to share current information with people in a room, including people without reliable access to the internet, on screens and on printed sheets. Each screen or sheet is called a display, and a group can have as many displays as it needs, each with its own name and its own web address, such as https://beacon.example.org/community-room.

• A Beacon screen runs in the web browser of a television, a monitor, or an old tablet in the room. Volunteers can set each screen's size and orientation, its colors and text size, and how long it shows each page before moving to the next.
• A Beacon sheet is a printed page in a plain, mostly black-and-white design, on Letter, Legal, Tabloid, A4, or A3 paper, for posting on a board or a wall or for handing out. A sheet draws on the same information as the screens, so a freshly printed sheet matches what they show.

A group without screens can use printed sheets alone, and a group without the VOICE software can keep a printed board of session information and resources, with a QR code that leads to the same information online.

Information Shown

Volunteers choose what each display shows from these kinds of information.

• Emergency alerts, which every display shows, kept in place until they end.
• Current alerts from VOICE Alerts, chosen by type and priority, each keeping its own color, icon, and type name, and any alert a volunteer chose for that display.
• Messages from relays that a volunteer chose for that display.
• Custom information, such as a schedule change or a new service, with an optional start and end, which can be written once and shown on several displays.
• Part of a public page of this site, such as the opening of a page or one of its sections, which stays up to date as the page changes.
• The message line and how to write a message.
• The date and time, large enough to read across the room.

Each kind of information appears in its own region of the display. Volunteers can move the regions up or down and hide any of them except Emergency alerts, so that no display ever leaves out a current emergency. A printed sheet also says at its foot when it should be replaced.

Volunteers can show every alert, and every link in custom information or a page, as a QR code that a phone can scan. An alert without a link of its own gets a code for its page on the Alerts site, where its translations and Read Aloud are available. A display can also show each alert, block of information, and page in the other languages the site offers, when a translation exists. Setting Up a Beacon Screen explains how to set up a television or a tablet so that it starts by itself and stays awake.

Messages on Beacon

No relay appears on Beacon unless a volunteer puts it there. Before posting a relay, a volunteer asks for the sender's agreement whenever that is feasible, and records in the relay's Beacon section that the sender asked or agreed, or that asking was not feasible. The volunteer then writes the text to be shown, leaving out anything private, and chooses Show From, the first day on which it is shown. A volunteer whose role allows choosing displays then chooses the screens and sheets. Any other volunteer who works on relays uses Ask for a Note on Beacon instead, which notifies the people who choose displays so that one of them can approve it. The display shows the text with the relay's number and hides every phone number and email address in it. Show Until, the last day it is shown, starts a set number of days ahead, 14 on a new site, which Settings > Beacon can change. The volunteer can move it to any day up to 60 days away. After that day, the message comes off the display by itself.

Pages and Alerts on Beacon

Volunteers place alerts, messages from relays, and public pages on displays in the same way, with Show on Beacon, which a relay calls Show a Note on Beacon. It appears in the alert form and on a sent alert's page, in a relay's Beacon section, and on a page's own view in Operations. Each item's page then says which displays show it. Only published public pages can be shown, and a page that is made Volunteers Only, returned to a draft, or archived comes off every display within a minute. Anyone with the permission to choose displays can take any item off them, because removing an item can only reduce what a display shows.

Permissions

Volunteers with permission to create displays can create them and edit the ones they created, while those with permission to manage Beacon can edit, publish, and delete any display. On a new site, a display created by an Alert Drafter or an Alert Sender starts unpublished until someone who manages Beacon publishes it. A separate permission, Choose Beacon Displays for Alerts, Relays, and Wiki Pages, lets a volunteer choose where an item appears, and choosing displays for a wiki page also requires permission to edit wiki pages. Operations shows who created each display and who last changed it, although the screens and sheets themselves show no names. A group that would rather not let anyone who finds a display's address view it can require a key in that address.