The plan hangs on one person
The roster lives in a file that one person maintains. Anyone looking for a stand-in writes to her.
For Notfallseelsorge, crisis intervention and PSNV teams
Nobody goes out alone.
Sodalis is the software that holds a team's duty roster, knowledge base, contacts and incident documentation in one place. At three in the morning it is settled who is on duty and who gets asked next.
No sign-up, no e-mail address. You get your own instance with realistic data, deleted at the latest 60 minutes after your session ends. The application itself is in German.
- Runs in the browser, nothing to install
- A separate database per team
- Servers in Germany, no US services
- Two-factor sign-in for everyone
Every screenshot comes from the demo instance, with invented names and contacts. One click on “Start the demo” gets you the same screen.
Everyday life
The work before the work
Sodalis takes over three jobs that currently hang on individual people.
The request gets lost in the group
A short-notice stand-in is sought in a chat with fifty people. Anyone willing to answer has no idea whether someone already said yes.
The numbers are missing at year end
The sponsoring body, the supervising authority or a funder wants a report. It gets assembled from scraps of paper and a long search through old messages.
Duty roster
Signing up takes a minute
Everyone enters their own availability. The administration sees immediately where it is getting tight, and no longer has to ring round.
- Month grid with multi-selectMark a whole month and save once. There are three roles: Einsatzleitung (lead), Einsatzkraft (responder) and Bereitschaft (standby). How many of each a shift needs is yours to set.
- Stand-ins and swaps with a deadlineFourteen days is the default: until then signing out is enough, after that it goes through a request, either to one person or open to the team, always with a reply deadline and a visible state. The deadline follows your own rules.
- Short notice means urgentBy default, a request inside 24 hours is treated as urgent and arrives even if someone has set quiet hours.
- Absence gets recordedAnyone recording leave or training leaves no open gap in the plan. What becomes visible is the difference between „cannot“ and „has not answered yet“.
- Special duties alongside the regular rosterTown festival, large-scale exercise, memorial service: dates with their own staffing, their own requirement and their own sign-up.
- Print for the notice boardThe roster, the contact list and incident reports print as a clean page: full width, no buttons on paper, no day torn apart by a page break. What hangs on the board and sits in the vehicle needs no network.
On call
Everything for a callout on one screen
Contacts nearby, the knowledge pages for the situation, and the documentation form. The proximity search works even when no address service can be reached.
- Proximity search without an outside serviceEnter a postcode, get contacts sorted by distance. A postcode is resolved from a table inside the system, without a single call to the outside.
- Call with one tapThe phone number is large and dials with one tap. A second tap starts navigation. The distance is a range, „about 3–5 km“, because it is calculated as the crow flies.
- The form fills itself during the calloutStart the callout, record who is involved, keep an eye on the situation, close the callout. The documentation form fills up as you go.
- Maps from a German public sourcebasemap.de from the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy. The server fetches and caches the map; no device calls a foreign tile server.
- An e-mail that already says everythingWhoever is asked sees the weekday, date, shift times, the role sought and the deadline directly in the mail. Everyone sets for themselves what arrives; urgent messages always get through.
- Large type, large targetsType size can be switched in three steps for the whole application, there is a light and a dark version, and everything works with a thumb. How that is tested is on the accessibility page.
Knowledge and contacts
The knowledge base is filled from day one
A knowledge base with three example pages looks like a prototype. Sodalis therefore ships with 37 professional pages as a starting point, plus 19 guides to the software itself and 6 example pages for your vehicles.
- Professional pages from day oneIncident indications, working with police, fire service and EMS, confidentiality and documentation, aftercare and self-care. Every professional page carries a visible note that your own specialists must review and replace it before it counts on a callout.
- Linked to the incident indicationEvery page can be attached to incident indications. The callout screen then shows exactly the articles that belong to that situation.
- Contacts the whole team maintainsFire and ambulance stations, hospitals, undertakers, police, neighbouring teams. Every entry has a category, a location, numbers and notes that anyone may add to. Correct a number once and it is corrected for everyone.
Documentation
Structured forms. No free text.
Incident reports in Sodalis have no field for a narrative. What gets recorded is the date, the indication, the alerting agency, the number of people affected, the measures taken, any onward referral, the duration and who was deployed. Nothing else.
Not every volunteer Notfallseelsorgende can rely on a right to refuse testimony in court. A system that invites detailed written documentation raises their personal legal exposure. The field is missing on purpose.
The content of a report is visible only to those involved, the person who wrote it and the leadership. Everyone else sees the title, the date and the status. The same rule applies to attachments.
A solid annual report still comes out of it. It is calculated from the structured fields, and it prints or exports as a table.
What Sodalis is not
Sodalis is not a primary alerting channel. The Leitstelle still reaches the Einsatzleitung by phone, and that stays the case. This exclusion becomes an explicit part of the contract.
I am working on follow-up alerting with real acknowledgements, so that extra responders can be called in when a situation grows beyond what was planned. Today that runs through the contacts nearby, with a tap on the number.
Data protection and security
Where your data sits
One thing up front, because your data protection officer will ask: I run the server your data sits on. Whoever does that can technically reach the data, with me as with any other provider. So the question is not whether I could, but what happens if I do — and that is in the contract and in your own audit log.
A separate database per team
Your data sits in its own database, separate from every other team's. You can pull your entire holdings as a machine-readable export at any time, without asking me and without waiting for me.
Germany and the EU, no US services
Servers and backups are in Germany, mail delivery in the EU. No service I engage is subject to the CLOUD Act. Anyone opening a route from a contact leaves Sodalis and lands in the map app of their choice; that is a link the person taps, and nothing is transmitted before they do.
You lose the phone, not the access
Two-factor sign-in applies to everyone, with no exception and no switch. Anyone who loses their phone gets back in with a recovery code. If those are gone too, your own administration resets the second factor without touching the password.
Your data protection officer has further questions? Write to me and I will send the technical and organisational measures as a document. admin@flamingbattenberg.de
Pricing
Two items, one price for the whole team
Fifteen people cost the same as fifty. There are no add-on modules and no pricing tiers by headcount.
Setup
on request
one-off, at the start
- Setting up your own instance with its own database
- Importing member and contact data from your list, in any format
- Your colours and your logo
- Staffing per role and shift, shift times and deadlines set to your own rules
- A briefing for the administration, plus a trained deputy on your side
- Invitations to all members
Annual licence
on request
per year, for the whole team
- All features, all people, no upper limit
- Updates, security updates and improvements included
- Daily encrypted backup with a weekly restore test
- Data processing agreement, in the church-law version on request
- E-mail support within contractually agreed hours
- Data export you can trigger yourself at any time
- One-year term, renewed only if you renew it
- Cancellation informally up to four weeks before the end of the term
One one-off item for setup, one annual item for running it, no tiers by headcount. The price is calculated so that operation, backups and further development stay funded, even if only a few teams take part.
Small team, tight budget? If the price is the only thing standing in the way, tell me. I have never yet turned a team down over the price. admin@flamingbattenberg.de
Common questions
What teams want to know before deciding
- Where are the servers?
In Germany, with a German provider holding ISO 27001 certification and a data processing agreement available immediately. Mail delivery sits in France, also inside the EU.
No service I engage is subject to the CLOUD Act. Providers, certificates and the sub-processor annex I name in conversation and in the contract, because they can change.
- Do we get a data processing agreement?
Yes, in two versions: under the GDPR, and in a church-law variant for bodies subject to the KDG or the DSG-EKD.
Both are drawn up by a lawyer before the contract is signed, and your data protection officer gets them for review. I do not expect you to sign unread.
- Our sponsoring body is a church. Is this enough?
I apply the strictest standard throughout, including for teams that only fall under the GDPR. The most important consequence in practice: no US data processor anywhere in the data path.
On top of that, there is no free-text field in the incident documentation. Anyone doing pastoral work should not be nudged by the system into written narratives.
- What happens to our data if we cancel?
You trigger the full export yourself, whenever you want, and you get an open format. After that your database is deleted; it ages out of the backups according to the deletion schedule.
Both are in the contract, with deadlines.
- What do our members have to do to take part?
Everyone sets their own password and sets up the second factor: an authenticator app on a phone or on a computer, two minutes per person. Passwords handed out by the administration do not exist, not even at the start.
Nobody has to install anything, Sodalis runs in the browser. And if someone can no longer get into their account, a recovery code or your own administration sorts it out — you do not need me for that.
Who is behind it
Christoph Seiler, Flaming Battenberg
Sodalis is developed and run by one person. That means short paths and no change that has to pass a committee first. It also means a one-person operation has to answer the continuity question before it is asked. Four points therefore apply, and they become part of the contract:
- Your data is yoursA complete export can be triggered by you at any time, in an open format, without asking me and without waiting for me.
- A trained deputy on your sidePart of the rollout is that someone in your team masters the administration and has a documented emergency access.
- Service hours are limited, explicitlyThere is no 24/7 promise. What is committed is in the contract, with hours. The most common support case — someone can no longer get into their account — is solved by your trained deputy in two minutes, independently of me and of the time of day.
- Notice, if the service endsIf operation is discontinued, there is a contractually guaranteed notice period and the complete handover of all data.
Take a look
A complete instance with a realistic roster, the knowledge pages and an inbox. You can touch everything, it is your own copy.
Please do not enter real personal data in the demo. Your instance is deleted at the latest 60 minutes after you leave it, and in any case after three hours. The demo, like the application itself, is in German.