Individual Rex Brooks Voting Member

CAP SC Meeting January 13, 2017

Meeting Attendees

Company Name Role Individual Rex Brooks Voting Member Individual Gary Ham Member Environment Canada Norm Paulsen Voting Member Individual Eliot Christian Guest Individual Elysa Jones Voting Member

A quorum of voting members was in attendance. Elysa chaired the start of the meeting and Rex Brooks acted as secretary.

The meeting notes from December 16, 2016 were reviewed. Rex moved to approve as amended, Gary seconded. The notes were approved with all in favor.

Gary and Eliot noted that USGS no longer sends out alerts with CAP format and Gary said he would look into it from the IPAWS viewpoint.

The meeting began with a review of the work remaining on the practices guide. We reviewed the proposed wording for the High-Priority Alerts and Cell Broadcast. Elysa noted that CAP was adopted by Mauritius for emergency high-priority alerting in particular for landslides

For High-Priority Alerts the submitted wording reads:

*Distinguishing High-Priority CAP Alerts*

Some CAP implementors are seeking convergence on practices across alerting authorities internationally for distinguishing a subset of CAP alerts that are 'high-priority'. In this context. 'high-priority' alerts are those that could trigger a siren or other highly intrusive method to command the immediate attention of people at risk in the alerting area.

Agreed criteria for distinguishing high-priority alerts is important because such alerts are typically due to a near-term life-critical situation. Without such criteria, alerting authorities at the operational level (fire chiefs, police chiefs, mayors...) would be more prone to confusion and mistakes such as triggering sirens unintentionally or neglecting to trigger sirens that should have been triggered. Crucial implementation differences could also arise across alerting system implementors (e.g., social media communicators, app developers, siren programmers, cell phone services, television and radio broadcasters, among many others...). Such differences would quickly lead to public confusion as media transmission of any particular alert ends up being patchy, e.g. a siren sounds but cell phones don't get SMS messages; crawl text shows on TV but there is no radio announcement, some apps act on an alert while others don't, etc.

As an example practice, CAP implementors in the United States adopted a fairly simple criteria for designating an alert as high-priority in this sense: situations in which people need to act immediately or within the next hour, in response to an extraordinary or significant threat, that is already observed or is likely to occur

This criteria is implemented enabled (suggested by Norm, okayed by Eliot) directly in CAP by selecting either of the top two levels of Urgency, Severity, and Certainty (as de- fined in the CAP data dictionary for those elements). This practice is further discussed in the GDPC Guide for Identifying High Priority Public Warnings .

See also Section on “Unknown.” (suggested by Eliot)

Eliot noted that there is a problem with the value assigned to urgency, severity and certainty, in particular where the value of “unknown” is used erroneously in an arithmetic progression from 0 for unknown as if it were the least priority. Rex noted that this was not specifically called out in the wording submitted and asked if it should be. Eliot said that it is called out elsewhere in the Practices Guide. See also Section on “Unknown.”

For Cell Broadcast the wording reads:

*Cell Broadcast Complements a CAP-enabled Alerting System*

Alerting authorities in the United States and several other countries disseminate high-priority CAP alerts so that they can be received by every cell phone in the alerting area. This very useful dissemination method is accomplished by use of "Cell Broadcast", a standard message delivery service over cellular phone systems.

When Cell Broadcast is used for public alerting, the warning message goes to each cellular base station (cell tower) in the alerting area. That base station then sends the warning message to all cell phones in its range. The warning message is delivered whether or not the phone owner subscribes to the particular cellular service, and delivery works for plain cell phones as well as smart phones. It is also important to note that the base station sends the warning message *immediately* as a broadcast, which is much faster and more reliable than calling contacting (suggested by Norm, okayed by Eliot) perhaps thousands of individual cell phones, one by one.

For these reasons, cell broadcast is ideal for severe emergencies, particularly because in this situation cellular message traffic is often heavy and the cellular network itself may have been degraded by the emergency. Delivery of warning messages via Cell Broadcast is relatively straightforward in any alerting system that is CAP-enabled because the information in a CAP message is structured for automated processing.

Readers who are interested in promulgating guidance on how Cell Broadcast complements a CAP-enabled alerting system should contact the OASIS EM-TC public comment list."

Norm raised a concern about what practices should be advised for constructing text messages. Eliot said we should leave it open and see what comes in and then discuss it. Several related issues were discussed.

Eliot noted that he still hasn’t gotten a response from the IFRC on the subject of the list and Norm said he would reference his work to a normalized list if we can out one together. Eliot said his research in Library Science discovered that those resources are too broad for our purposes, so we are still in the market for a host for the event list.

The meeting concluded with Norm moving to adjourn and Gary seconding, all in favor.