[EAS] Whole New Ballgame

[Botterell, Arthur@CalOES]

Bill,

What you describe is very much like the program of the non-profit Partnership for Public Warning, which formed and subsequently disbanded 2001-2004.  We had three sectors along the lines you describe:  industry, government, and academics (mainly social scientists).  You might think of the scientists as sort of a proxy for the public, as it was public response to warning that they'd studied.  The PPW published several useful documents before concluding that FEMA/DHS had no interest in supporting its work, and therefore disbanding.

Also, at present we have the FCC CSRIC's working group tasked with a "Complete Reimagining of Public Warning Systems."  Sadly, the leadership of that working group has decided that a soup-to-nuts reimagining is too big an undertaking and thus is restricting the group to a fairly modest review of existing technologies instead.  (If that brings an explicative to your lips, Bill, be assured it's nothing I haven't already muttered.)

And then there's the so-called "AWARN Alliance," a group formed to marshall advanced public alerting as a marketing argument for the adoption of the ATSC 3.0 television technology.  That group has convened vendors and engineers, with only very limited involvement of government or academe, to devise a whole new approach to alert delivery based on ATSC 3 features.  (Radio folks, I guess you're excused from that conversation.)

So... much as I support what you're saying, Bill, I'm afraid that warning utopia continues to elude us, either due to inertia and self-satisfaction, lack of energy, or commercial pre-occupation and technological determinism.  But don't despair, there are some who continue the quest.

In that regard, I'd recommend to the attention of everyone here a new video from FEMA, featuring distinguished researcher and teacher Dr. Dennis Mileti in an entertaining and brief TED-talk-style discussion of some of the essentials of public alerting from the social-science perspective:

     <https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/20180213-1405-902-7488/Dennis_Mileti.mp4>

In my estimation this is a video that should be shown... by force if necessary... to every public safety and emergency management official in the land, as well as to everyone else who believes there must be a better way.  Dennis doesn't call for utopia, but merely for more effective use of the capabilities we already have.

Nonetheless, Bill, keep that soapbox handy!  After all, if we keep doing what we're doing, we'll keep getting what we've got.

Art