Paper logs blow away.
Your event's story shouldn't.

FestivalIMS is a field-ready incident management system for festivals and regional burns — shift rosters, incident reports, witness statements, and a forensic audit trail, all in an interface designed for 3 AM, dusty hands, and a Chromebook at the edge of nowhere.

See the SOAK front door ▸ Host it for your event

Battle-tested as the ranger reporting system for SOAK*2026: Not to Scale — the Portland regional Burning Man event at Justesen Ranch, Tygh Valley, Oregon.

Features

Every feature exists because a ranger needed it on shift. Nothing here is speculative — it all ran during a real event, under real load, with real incidents.

Forms

Every report your event needs

Shift reports, quick incidents, detailed incident reports, individual ranger narratives, incident summaries, and witness statements — with smart auto-populate from the active shift so nobody types the same header twice.

Shift Ops

Roster & callsign management

Track who's on shift, in what role (Lead, OOD/Khaki, Kit…), with which radio, partnered with whom. Incident numbers auto-increment per shift so the log stays clean.

Trust

Forensic audit trail

Every meaningful change is logged and replayable. When someone asks "who changed this and when," you have an answer — not a shrug.

Access

Per-callsign PIN login

Each ranger gets a 4-digit PIN tied to their callsign. Fast enough for a shared terminal, accountable enough for an audit log. Role-based views for Rangers, Khaki, and leadership.

Awareness

Event map, schedule & safety plan

A live event map, shift schedule with Gantt view, sound policy, and safety plan — the reference material lives next to the reporting, not in a binder someone left in a truck.

Escalation

Must-report notifications

Incidents that leadership must know about trigger email notifications automatically. The 4 AM incident doesn't wait for the 9 AM meeting.

Night Ops

Built for the dark

Dark mode by default, high-contrast warm palette, big touch targets for gloved or cold fingers, and font sizes that don't require reading glasses at the Khaki desk.

Data

Your data, exportable

Full JSON export, per-shift exports, and CSV-friendly reporting. It's your event's data — take it wherever you need it.

Feedback

Bug reporting built in

Rangers file issues from inside the app, mid-shift. The system that collects incident reports also collects its own — that's how it got this good.

Command Center — when the wifi isn't a thing

Events happen in canyons, ranches, and playas where connectivity is a rumor. The Command Center is a Windows desktop client that keeps a full local, encrypted mirror of your event's data and runs happily with no internet at all — then reconciles with the cloud, bidirectionally and with zero data loss, whenever a link appears.

How it works on shift

  • Enroll a terminal with leadership credentials in under 60 seconds
  • Bootstrap a full season's data from the cloud in under 5 minutes
  • Operate fully offline for 24+ hours — reads, writes, new incidents, edits
  • Reconnect and sync both directions; conflicting edits go to a simple review queue instead of silently clobbering anyone's work
  • Local database is encrypted at rest — a stolen terminal isn't a data breach

Hardware options for no-connectivity events

  • One laptop, whole event: run the entire system on a single machine serving your camp's LAN — no internet required, ever
  • Kiosk terminals: Windows 11 Pro stations locked down with Assigned Access and a watchdog, provisioned by included scripts — walk-up ready, hard to break
  • Chromebooks: the original SOAK deployment — cheap, rugged, long battery, runs the app locally in Linux mode
  • Intermittent uplink: Starlink or LTE that comes and goes? Sync opportunistically; the conflict queue handles the rest

Metrics

You can't staff next year on vibes. FestivalIMS measures the event while you run it. These are real charts from the system — with anonymized example data standing in for a real event's numbers.

Incidents logged, by category

The usage-analytics view: what came in, of what kind, across the event. Saturday is always Saturday — now you can prove it.

Assist & welfare Medical Sound Fire safety
0 20 40 Assist & welfare Medical Sound Fire safety 37 on Saturday night Thu Fri Sat Sun Mon

Hours per ranger, per role

From real shift start and end times. Volunteer recognition and burnout detection, straight from the data.

Dirt Khaki Lead
Bramble Coyote Ducky Ferret Juniper Bramble — Dirt 18 h Bramble — Khaki 6 h Coyote — Dirt 14 h Coyote — Khaki 10 h Ducky — Dirt 16 h Ducky — Lead 4 h Ferret — Dirt 12 h Ferret — Khaki 4 h Ferret — Lead 6 h Juniper — Dirt 20 h 24 h 24 h 20 h 22 h 20 h

Incidents by time of day

When the reports actually come in — so next year's shift grid matches the real curve, not the optimistic one.

Noon — 2 2 pm — 3 4 pm — 4 6 pm — 6 8 pm — 9 10 pm — 13 Midnight — 11 2 am — 6 4 am — 3 13 12p 4p 8p 12a 4a

Who's on, when — the shift Gantt

Every ranger's shifts from gate-open to teardown — morning, afternoon, swing, and graveyard — colored by role, sorted by first clock-in. The shape tells the true story of every event: the core crew starts on day one and just keeps going, while later arrivals stack in beneath them with a shift or two. That envelope is your real staffing curve — and next year's recruiting plan.

Dirt Khaki Lead OOD
Thu Fri Sat Sun Mon MASG MASG MASG MASG MASG Bramble Coyote Ducky Ferret Juniper Magpie Onion Pickle Quill Radish Bramble — Khaki, Thu morning–swing Bramble — Khaki, Fri morning–swing Bramble — Khaki, Sat morning–swing Bramble — Khaki, Sun morning–swing Bramble — Khaki, Mon morning–afternoon Coyote — Dirt, Thu afternoon–graveyard Coyote — Dirt, Fri afternoon–graveyard Coyote — Dirt, Sat afternoon–graveyard Coyote — Dirt, Sun afternoon–graveyard Coyote — Dirt, Mon afternoon–swing Ducky — Lead, Thu swing–graveyard Ducky — Lead, Fri swing–Sat morning Ducky — Lead, Sat swing–Sun morning Ducky — Lead, Sun swing–Mon morning Ducky — Lead, Mon swing–graveyard Ferret — Dirt, Thu graveyard–Fri morning Ferret — Dirt, Fri graveyard–Sat morning Ferret — Dirt, Sat graveyard–Sun morning Ferret — Dirt, Sun graveyard–Mon morning Ferret — Dirt, Mon graveyard Juniper — Dirt, Fri morning–afternoon Juniper — Dirt, Sat afternoon–swing Juniper — Dirt, Sun afternoon–swing Juniper — Dirt, Mon afternoon Magpie — OOD, Fri afternoon–swing Magpie — OOD, Sat swing–graveyard Magpie — OOD, Sun swing–graveyard Onion — Dirt, Sat morning–afternoon Onion — Dirt, Sun afternoon–swing Onion — Dirt, Mon swing Pickle — Dirt, Sat swing Pickle — Dirt, Sun graveyard Pickle — Dirt, Mon swing Quill — Dirt, Sun morning Quill — Dirt, Mon afternoon Radish — Dirt, Sun swing KhakiKhakiKhakiKhakiKh DirtDirtDirtDirtDirt LeadLeadLeadLeadLead DirtDirtDirtDirt DirtDirtDirt OODOODOOD DirtDirt

Example data, anonymized — callsigns and counts are illustrative. During your event these dashboards are live, plus a per-callsign login history for the audit-minded.

Reporting — the questions you'll actually get asked

Because everything is structured and exportable, answering the hard questions goes from a weekend of shuffling paper to a filter and an export. Some generalized examples:

"How many medical incidents did we have, per night, and when did they peak?" — your producer, planning next year's medic coverage
"Give me the complete timeline of incident #23 — every report, edit, and who touched it." — the after-action review (or the insurance company)
"Which hours of the event generated the most reports, and did we have enough rangers on at those times?" — shift planning, with evidence instead of folklore
"Total volunteer hours by person and role, for recognition and for the org's annual report." — your volunteer coordinator, in about thirty seconds
"A CSV of all noise complaints with locations and resolutions, please." — the landowner conversation you want to walk into prepared

Pricing

This is not enterprise software with enterprise invoices. One flat price, everything handled, no subscription.

$100 /festival

We host it and do all the things: your own site at yourevent.festivalims.com, set up and configured for your event's forms, roles, and callsigns — stood up before your gate opens, supported while it's running, and yours for the whole event.

Your data — always

When the event wraps, you get a complete export of everything — every report, roster, and audit entry — and on request we delete it all from our servers. No lock-in, no data hostage-taking, no surprise renewal email next spring.

Get set up for your event

A work of love

FestivalIMS wasn't built by a vendor. It was built by a ranger, for rangers, iterated live during a real event with real feedback from the people standing at the Khaki desk.

That also means it isn't one-size-fits-all by design — it's one-size-fits-you. Your event's forms, roles, radio culture, and escalation rules are different from SOAK's, and the system can be adjusted and tuned to match. If you're interested in running it for your event, reach out — helping another event get off paper is exactly the point.

Talk to us about your event