Observations

Safety Observation Reports: anyone on site can say what they saw — by app, QR poster, geofence or anonymously — and every one lands in a single H&S triage queue before it reaches the wider site.

An Observation is a Safety Observation Report — the something was seen record, as against the incident's something happened. Anyone on site can raise one: an unsafe act, an unsafe condition, or a piece of safe behaviour worth naming. It can be filed from the app, from a printed QR poster, from walking through the gate, or anonymously — and every one of them lands in the same place, a single H&S triage queue, before anybody else on the site sees it.

Termglossary

Observation →

A Safety Observation Report: an on-site safety sighting — an unsafe act, unsafe condition, or safe behaviour (ObservationType) — raised by anyone on site, including anonymously (in-app or via a QR Observation capture link), and gated through HSE Observation triage before it reaches the wider site. Modelled as a WorkGroup(group_type= observation) with a 1:1 ObservationDetail extension and surfaced as the fifth Auxiliary pin kind — the heroicons eye glyph, tinted by the derived Observation risk rating band once published (pending pins render dimmed on the HSE-only view). It shares Incident's *shape* — a positioned pin with Position provenance, involved entities, free-text persons, evidence, a Mention-bearing discussion thread, an event timeline — but its own lifecycle: submitted → triaged → published-or-discarded, with map visibility derived from status + band vs the site's Observation visibility threshold (accepted safe_behaviour rows are threshold-exempt), never encoded in the status. Submission emails site hse users immediately; crossing into visibility at triage emails coordinators. Accepted observations feed the report exactly once via the Report observation queue (a section plus SOR summary stats); an open published Observation is a Now-anchored surface item — never a Noticeboard row. Decided 2026-06-11 (grill session), superseding the 2026-06-09 instant-publish identity: see docs/decisions/2026-06-11-observation-triage-rework.md. _Avoid_: incident (the *something happened* record; Observation is the *something was seen* record); the v1 sense "calm instant-publish operational flag" (superseded); inspection / action (sibling surfaces — and note the boundary: an inspection Item result is deliberately never promoted to an Observation); note, sighting, finding.

What it does for you

The barrier to reporting is a phone and thirty seconds. Type, a risk rating tapped on a colour-zoned 5×5 grid, a sentence, a photo, and where exactly. No account needed on the QR path.
Anonymity is real, not sealed. An Anonymous observation records no reporter at all — there is no hidden identity column to subpoena. The trade-off is accepted out loud: no see-own powers and no notification back to the reporter.
Nothing reaches the site unsifted. Observation triage is the H&S gate: accept or discard, re-rate, set or correct the type and hazard category, and reposition the pin — routine when an anonymous submission arrived on an Inferred location. Coordinators never triage; the gate exists so they see a sifted register.
Visibility is derived, never typed in. Who can see a rated observation falls out of its status and its band against the site's Observation visibility threshold — so a re-rating never churns the status, and a positive (safe_behaviour) observation is threshold-exempt: once accepted, everyone sees the green eye.
Good news counts too. The SOR three-way is deliberate. Safe behaviours carry no risk rating and feed the report's positive-observation ratio, so the register is not purely a catalogue of what went wrong.
Each one reaches a report exactly once. Accepted observations join the Report observation queue and are consumed by the first exported report that offered them — printed, force-excluded or left below the floor alike. Ones still open later reappear as the non-consuming Still-open observations register.

The lifecycle at a glance

pending_triage → open or discarded, with open ⇄ resolved reopenable. Discarding is a triage verdict and is restorable; it is not the soft-delete, which stays reserved for spam and test data. Two axes are deliberately kept off this enum: visibility, which is derived, and the Observation risk rating band, which triage may move without touching status.

Four ways in, one queue

In the app — quick capture from the map, or the full form, with the reporter attributed (or the submit anonymously tick).
A QR poster — an Observation capture link opens an unauthenticated mobile form. One revocable link per site; regeneration is revoke-and-mint.
A geofence — Geofenced capture entry checks the device against the Site boundary, so somebody walking on site can report without hunting for a poster.
A supervisor's phone, on someone else's behalf, with the free-text person recorded rather than invented as a user account.

See it / try it

Where to go next

Incidents — the sibling record for something that actually happened.
Corrective actions — triage-accept offers one, prefilled and skippable.
Inspections — the scheduled, checklist-driven surface; its items are deliberately never promoted to observations.