[EAS] Whole New Ballgame

[Ed Czarnecki]

In addition to FCC CSRIC, there is a mirror working group within the FEMA National Advisory Council's IPAWS Subcommittee.  That working group is also charted with looking at the possible futures of emergency alerting.  As you know I've been working to ensure that this committee incorporates a methodology that goes farther than just a technology review.  I'm hoping this entity can take a look at the whole ball game.

The work of CSRIC is generally bounded by the scope of the FCC's own charter.  So this FCC committee may not be able to take the far-reaching look that some of us wanted to take.  Seems like this is may not the place to talk about the whole ball game at the moment.

The AWARN Alliance is at heart a coalition of technology providers and television broadcasters.   By definition it's not looking at the whole ball game, but at specific tools that may be used in the future.  I would not say AWARN is itself devising a whole new approach to alert delivery based on ATSC 3.0 features. ATSC 3.0 emergency communication capabilities are broader than alerting.  So in a sense I would look at this as the future of broadcast information delivery, not necessarily emergency alerting in specific.

Also - importantly - the delivery method and scope of emergency communications capabilities in ATSC 3.0 is defined in a body of standards maintained by the Advanced Television Standards Committee, not AWARN.  There is also a separate ATSC organization working on guidelines and interoperability practices.  In addition, standards and recommended practices for the consumer electronics industry (TV sets) are occurring right now within the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)  Likewise, the CTA focus is much broader than just emergency alerting.

AWARN itself will eventually be taking a look at the user interface, or at least user experience, for the audience.  And this might well be one of the first times that I know of that an entity is going to look at the viewer experience from a social science perspective.  It's going to be valuable work, but AWARN's scope isn't about the entire public warning ecosystem, at least not in the organization's current form.

So that brings me back to the FEMA NAC as potentially being the venue for tackling "the whole ball park". 

Plus, an interesting feature of the NAC is that many of the private sector participants are essentially contracted as special government employees -- we are supposed to switch off our day-to-day job agendas during NAC work.  We don't get paid as SGEs, but we are subject to many of the same non-disclosure, ethics, and conflict of interest rules as a public sector employee.  And I think this has contributed to the level of discourse in the organization.

Edward Czarnecki, Ph.D.
Senior Director - Strategic and Government Affairs
Monroe Electronics Inc. / Digital Alert Systems