[CAP] The "User Experience" of Warnings in EAS

[Art Botterell]

Thanks, David.  Yes, I agree on personalization, although from an  
operator's viewpoint I'd like to have some consistency in what public  
expectations I need to manage/meet... and there's also an argument  
from social science that consistency matters.  But as usual we need  
the middle way and, as you say, there aren't a lot of folks who  
specialize in balance.

Apparently there's going to be a hearing in House Homeland Security on  
the 14th about this stuff.  Any thoughts as to how we might get the  
user-experience issue on the policy agenda before it gets framed as  
merely an engineering problem?

- Art

On May 8, 2008, at 5/8/08 8:02 PM, David Aylward wrote:

> This is a very thoughtful article, Art.  Good for you.
>
> User interface/engagement is really an entirely different issue than  
> the transport and distribution/routing issues that are the expertise  
> of most the parties who have been involved with CAP, EDXL etc.
>
> You bridge those worlds, but most of us don't.  The telco guys who  
> created their own standard instead of CAP in the FCC WARN process  
> certainly are not experts on the psychology of public warning --  
> they are superb network engineers.
>
> It is not clear to me that the answer is a centralized answer versus  
> a user defined one.  My work with persons with disabilities has  
> taught me that many of my assumptions about emergency communications  
> were too narrow.  But these are issues that persons with real  
> expertise in human response should be addressing, not tech folks.