[EAS] The words we use

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

Again, Sean, I wonder where your sense of expertise comes from.  My experience both with and as a PIO/PAO (what they called us at FEMA) is that they're exquisitely sensitive to the subjectivity of audience response.  Not that that's especially germane, as PIOs very rarely issue warning messages.  

In any event, any tendency toward alert originator machismo, wherever it may be found, is exactly why CAP needs to emphasize "fuzzy" concerns... like, say, the distinction between Urgency, Severity, and Certainty, which are commonly lumped together unhelpfully in some sort of "priority" ranking.  CAP was designed to be effective, not to please crowds.

Indeed, CAP was designed, among other things, to provide a checklist of essential elements of warning information based on scientific evidence.  Under stress, even an untrained alert composer can have reasonable confidence that if he uses the CAP format he won't miss anything crucial.  Certainly there are folks who view any application of science as an infringement of their right to behave ignorantly, but I'll confess I don't lie awake worrying about them.  Results will tell the only tale that matters.

As for the Common Look and Feel... it's a great idea to be consistent at the user interface.  Still, I would recall Jon Postel's famous Internet dictum: "We must resist the temptation to standardize that which we don't yet understand."  The CL&F will be as successful as it is carefully and scientifically designed and refined based on experience.  I wish the land of my forefathers the best of luck with that.  Perhaps once the CL&F has matured and been field-proven it will be something we can borrow from them.

Anyway, as transmission becomes more ubiquitous and commodified, the nature of the channel matters less and less.  Ultimately, I believe, the composition of the message will be the only thing that matters.

Art
________________________________________
From: EAS <eas-bounces at radiolists.net> on behalf of Sean Donelan <sean at donelan.com>

On Wed, 6 Sep 2017, Botterell, Arthur at CalOES wrote:
> That's why we designed CAP based not on technology or on particular
> hazards, but on the most consistent element of the warning system, which
> is the psychology and sociology of the human recipients of alerts.

On the other hand, emergency PIO's don't like fuzzy when it comes to their
messaging.  They want to know exactly how the message will be presented to
the public.

That's one of the reasons emergency officials in Canada created the
"Common Look and Feel" standards. CAP was just a transport protocol, not a
public presentation standard.  Canada is now creating other "Common
Look and Feel" for mobile phone alerting. Canada didn't use EAS event
codes in its version of CAP, but still needed a coordinated set of event
names for its CAP messages.

By the times all the parts of the alerting system are defined with enough
specificity to be useful, its less about the specific transmission
protocols and more about the overall system.