Friends -
Now that we have a bit of actual experience with CAP… and now that CAP has been adopted as a core technology for broadcast and cellular alerting in the U.S… it’s may be time to start talking about what we’ve learned that might make the next version of the CAP standard even better.
One of the factors to which I attribute the success of CAP is that so much of its design was accomplished in an open, informal and very international context prior to subjecting it to the constraints and rigors of a formal standards process. That’s no criticism of the need for formalities and structure, just a suggestion that the best results may come neither from pure freedom nor from pure structure, but from a thoughtful balance of the two.
Which is why I’d like to suggest that we on this list… the folks who got the ball rolling in the first place… should take a first stab at some recommendations for the next revision of the OASIS/ITU CAP specification.
We did pretty well using email the last time around, but not everyone prefers email for online collaboration. So I’ve taken the liberty of adding a new topic to the online CAP Forum at:
http://www.incident.com/capforum/viewforum.php?f=8
(It’ll be interesting to see how that works compared to the traditional email approach. I don’t see any reason we can’t use either or both as each of us prefers, at least until it becomes clear that one way is significantly better.)
Anyway, I’ve gone ahead and launched a handful of topics on the Forum based on some ideas I’ve jotted down recently:
- responseType: New values needed?
- area: How to describe motion?
- area: Harmonizing the geometries
- info: Need for unique identifiers?
- Mandatory and optional elements
- U.S. SAME Compatibility
Please feel free to debate these topics and to propose your own. I’ll do my best to keep the dialog civil and productive, and to hold the spammers at bay. Obviously all opinions expressed will be the writers’ own, and I’ll be taking neither responsibility nor ownership… in the argot of the venerable online community The WELL: “You own your own words.”
Thanks, and good luck to us all!
- Art
