The Air National Guard has announced Thursday it’s expanded the range of applications available for the "ReadyAirman.org" website and mobile app.
Ready Airman brings together three previous projects "to serve as the ANG content hub for readiness, risk and resilience information," a Thursday statement from the service said.
Having a website where Guard members can go for information is important because the service is spread out, said Col. Edward Vaughan, director of safety and executive director of the ANG Community Action Information Board.
"Unlike the active component, ANG families are typically not centralized around large bases, but geographically distributed throughout civilian communities in 54 states and territories," he said in a statement. "Ready Airman is designed to engage these 105,400 citizen-airmen and their families, wherever they may be."
The website and app are designed to provide Guard members all manner of information about the Air Force and Defense Department. One feature allows Officials said they will also have a feature allowing members and their families to locate the nearest military care providers including suicide prevention assistants, chaplains and family readiness managers.
Vaughan said the community of users can will also be able to rate the usefulness of information provided how helpful other websites are in providing useful information.
"There's an awful lot of websites out there and one of the biggest problems is how can anyone sort through them all and know which ones to use," he said. "We went out and found 400 websites that allege to help airmen and soldiers. Most of them do, but nobody can make any sense of all 400 at once. Starting this summer, everybody who uses ReadyAirman.org will have the ability to rate, qualitatively, what they've gotten out of each site."
Another The website and app will also have a feature, called "Fearless Five," that will allows users to program in five trusted individuals. Then, in the event of an emergency, one button push will send a notification to those five people – similar to an Amber Alert – informing them of trouble and giving them GPS coordinates of the person in need.
ReadyAirman.org is designed to replace three previous websites run by the ANG: Wingmanproject.org, Ready54.org, and Wingmanday.org.
Starting in 2005 with earlier versions of websites and apps, the Air National Guard "garnered more than a decade of experience innovating, developing, and fielding useful web and mobile platforms for Airmen, families and communities," Vaughan said.
"The ultimate goal is resilient airmen ready to execute our missions in a downrange war fight, a home front domestic response, or build security cooperation through partnerships around the globe. To do that we need to engage families too," he said.
