Re: [earlywarning] [CAP] Definition of Warning Categories

Rex:

Very insightful comments.  Certainly you are pointing in the right
direction.  Many of us are working with alliances to make sure that safety
uses are part of this stimulus.  The law and regulations call for safety to
be part of the mix.  

However, our enthusiasm should be tempered a bit by the emphasis the
recently issued rules make for use of the funds.  With a relatively small
amount of money (a one time shot of $7 billion is small potatoes compared to
something like $35-40 billion annually in industry capex), many of us had
hoped that the rules would leverage this one time investment by focusing on
building integrated demand, i.e. get safety, healthcare, etc sharing
information and thus using broad band more and more.  

However, the predominant designated use for the first tranche of the
stimulus funds (only 1/3 of the NTIA amount) is digging trenches for fiber
into rural America. Nothing inherently wrong with that if someone has a
future business model to support the capex.   

But the problem in the safety/healthcare eco-system is not primarily access
to IP communications trunks, but application layer capability and
interoperability issues.  Part of the first part of the stimulus funds are
devoted to "Innovative and sustainable uses of broadband".   Hopefully more
will be in the future.  

-----Original Message-----
From: cap-list-bounces@lists.incident.com
[mailto:cap-list-bounces@lists.incident.com] On Behalf Of Rex Buddenberg
Sent: Monday, July 13, 2009 12:55 PM
To: Bob Robinson
Cc: IAEM List; EM Groups; earlywarning@ietf.org; cap-list@incident.com; Art
Botterell
Subject: Re: [CAP] Definition of Warning Categories

Bob,

You point into a very interesting parallel development out there in the
world.

In the stimulus bill last spring was $7.2B in grant money that went to
USDA ('broadband' and 'reach to rural') and NTIA in Commerce
('broadband' and 'reach to underserved').  The FCC was also charged with
drafting a 'national broadband plan'.  
	FCC published a Notice of Inquiry, for which the comment period just
closed last week.  About the first comment they sought was a definition
of 'broadband'.  (For paper coming from inside the beltway, this NOI is
pretty good stuff, IMHO).  Whatever your definition of broadband, you
can look behind it and see 'extension of the internet'.  And you should
recognize that extension of internet to rural and extension of internet
to emergency services has a whole lot of overlap.  
	Just to complete the federal nethead - bellhead list of players, DHS
and DoJ are still in circuit-switch.  ... and didn't get this batch of
grant money.

What you ought to get out of this is is that
	- emergency services vehicles will soon be routinely on the
internet.
	- the citizenry that emergency services exists to serve will
increasingly be on the internet.
	This observation is progressively true in any event -- the netheads
always win -- but the stimulus subsidies are probably going to be a
substantial accelerant.... Santa Ana winds behind a California
wildfire.  

On Sun, 2009-07-12 at 17:50 -0700, Bob Robinson wrote:
> Art,
> 
> Very good analysis.  In fact I think the question of user (consumer)
disconnect can be put to the broader field of general emergency management
communications and in fact it can be a very important part of any attempt to
build "standards" that are to be applied across groups/agencies/etc.
involved in emergency management.  But what  the heck, that's just my
nickels worth based on 25+ years of EM experience.
> 
> Bob Robinson
> 
> --- On Sun, 7/12/09, Art Botterell <acb@incident.com> wrote:
> 
> > From: Art Botterell <acb@incident.com>
> > Subject: Re: [CAP] Definition of Warning Categories
> > To: earlywarning@ietf.org, cap-list@incident.com
> > Date: Sunday, July 12, 2009, 2:23 PM
> 
> > I'm wondering whether it might be
> > simpler, at least in the near term, to let consumers
> > subscribe to selected sources rather than to topical
> > categories.  That pushes the question of message
> > authoritativeness / jurisdiction  /credibility out of
> > the CAP infrastructure and into the larger field of
> > inter-agency and inter-jurisidictional coordination, where
> > it more properly belongs.
> > 
> > Taxonomies tend to be culturally loaded and can never be
> > guaranteed to be complete.  Thus there's a real risk of
> > "categorical disconnects" leading to missed alerts either
> > because of differing interpretations of categories or of
> > unforeseen events that don't fit our preconceived
> > categories.  Maybe someday we'll have a reliable
> > taxonomy of the unexpected, but right now a degree of
> > deliberate imprecision seems to be the best we can do... and
> > I sometimes wonder whether even that is more helpful than it
> > is risky.
> > 
> > - Art
> > 
> > 
> > On Jul 12, 2009, at 7/12/09 11:58 AM, Hannes Tschofenig
> > wrote:
> > 
> > > I should provide a bit more feedback about the
> > background to my question.
> > > 
> > > If you only set the value in the category field for
> > the purpose of human
> > > consumption then there is not really an
> > interoperability issue.
> > > 
> > > Now, with the work on
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-rosen-sipping-cap-03
> > > we wanted to define an event package for SIP that
> > allows you to "subscribe"
> > > to certain type of events: you might indicate
> > something like location and
> > > the type of events you are interested in.
> > > 
> > > Now, the semantic of the category field suddently
> > matters. With the
> > > individuals-to-citizen emergency services we tried to
> > come up with a
> > > description of the emergency services categories, see
> > RFC 5031.
> > > 
> > > Ciao
> > > Hannes
> > 
> >
> _______________________________________________
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-- 
Rex Buddenberg
Naval Postgraduate School
Code IS/Bu
Monterey, Ca 93943
831/656-3576

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This list is for public discussion of the Common Alerting Protocol.  This
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