How to encourage ethical usage and discourage unethical usage?
I am currently creating a computer malfunction tool at a university IT center. Ideally, the tool is supposed to work as something similar to an amber alert, where the reporting of some event could be pushed to every users client. For instance, if a computer stops working, a warning could be pushed out to all available IT people in the building. The goal here is extremely fast response time, so that we can have every single computer running, and very fast response times during peak building hours. However, this tool relies entirely on the reports by student and faculty, as a ticketing system would be too slow and not useful in maintaining proper building uptime.
While completely ethical usage would make this tool extremely useful, it's naive to think that there won't be unethical users. I have a couple obvious problems, and couple not so obvious problems I would like to work out if possible. This tool might not be able to come to fruition, so it might just act as a user experience exercise.
How can I discourage false reports?
- A glaring issue that I see arising, is that many users will use this tool simply for mayhem. The reporting of a false problems would render the entire tool completely useless. How can I encourage proper usage, while eliminating improper use completely? Is this even possible for a tool like this? I feel like user accounts might solve some of the issues, but there really is no point to collecting that kind of data. I also came up with something similar to Google Circles, where only people in your circle can push updates to your client, but that's basically just texting. Best case scenario, I want all recipients of a notification to be able to take immediate action without worrying about false claims.
How can I push this information out to clients in a way that's effective but easy to use?
- I was imagining using something like a popup in the top bar of a device. In a single use scenario, this would work great, as the mere sighting of that icon would cause the user to take action. Is there any other way that I could separate the warning system from other applications? From say maybe a text or a Facebook notification?
Finally, how can I limit usage to particular buildings?
- In the case of WiFi connectivity, it seems easy enough to limit communications to only that network, but what about when users are on Mobile networks, or on a massive network spanning across a campus? I don't want users from building A to receive messages from building B, however I don't want a user to have to "join" a building network every time they want to use the tool. Would a geo-location limitation, similar to yik yak work?
Thanks in advance, and I'm open to all suggestions and project directions.