Open source and messaging's future

We have about 1.2 million people, includingareas of expensive homes as well as incidents at the oilrefineries along the coast. The warning system has beenmultimodal since the mid-1990s. It is all-hazards, fullyintegrated and everything is automatic. It feeds intosirens, weather radios, Emergency Alert System, telephonenotification, cable television and travelers' aidmessaging.For cell phone notifications, I just finished serving onthe Commercial Mobile Service Advisory Committee tothe FCC, as part of the Warn Act. What we found was that if you start with thetechnology, you have to devise the message to fit thetechnology. With CAP, we started with the social scienceand the need for public warnings. We defined the characteristicsof an effective warning system and messagingsystem and developed it from there to fit multipledevices and formats.An effective message has to hit you two to three times,so it has to be multimodal. Most people will not evacuatebased on a solitary message. Absolutely. It's a triumphof the open-sourceapproach to solve a problem:people just saying, "Let's do it!"The CAP never would have happenedif we relied on the marketplace,or on the government, asneither was interested in creatingthis.Now vendors are producingtechnology they interpret as CAP compatible.It may be just buzzword-compliant, but at least theyare recognizing CAP as a featurethat communities want. IPAWS seems to havebeen shrunk so that instead ofbeing an umbrella system, it willbe a collection of products. Theproblem I see is that the agenda isbeing driven by vendors. The riskis that we may end up with thepublic warning system that is themost profitable to build, ratherthan the one that is most complete,open and effective.We need to have more competition.The difficulty is thatthere is not an enormousamount of money to be made inpreparedness. You can prepare for adisaster with the NationalIncident Management Systemand the National ResponseFramework, but the reality isalways messy and unpredictable.There always will be chaos andpeople who have not workedtogether before. You need somethinglike a Google search engineavailable to help officials quicklyidentify all assets available forresponse, regardless of the source.That is the next frontier. We needhelp with navigation, indexingand discussing.We constantly need innovationto solve the really deep and interestingproblems. If we allow theexisting set of contractors todefine the space, they will defineit with solutions that they alreadyhave.I hope that the CAP can serveas an example of an alternativeway of doing things from thegrass-roots. Open-source computingis a vital partner for developingsolutions.