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Safety & Security
Best Practices in Emergency Communications
5/9/2008
Alert DC, which delivers emergency alerts on e-mail accounts, cell phones, pagers, BlackBerrys, and wireless PDAs. Alert DC is available free to citizens of the District of Columbia, as well as individuals traveling to or working in the District.As a frequent visitor to DC and as someone who always carries a cell phone when traveling I decided to sign up and see how the system works. It only took a few minutes to sign up on the Web. I was given a choice of alerts to which I wanted to subscribe. The weather alert was mandatory while the transportation, utilities, government office/school closings, amber, and breaking news alerts were optional. Within moments of signing up I received a text message alert confirmation on my BlackBerry and an e-mail alert confirmation in my Web browser.
In contrast to VT Alert, where the alerts were campus-focused, the Alert DC warnings were generic and covered a broad range of emergencies affecting a wide geographic area and large population. Which takes me back to my experiences with the tornado sirens in Lincoln. I have to wonder how many alerts, unrelated to a campus, it takes to cause a student to just "tune out?"
One problem generic to all voluntary systems is participation. Particularly if the system generates alerts not directly relevant to students and faculty. I suspect that is what led GW to implement a second strategy, "GW Alert." GW Alert makes use of a commercial personal communications product for Windows-based computers from BIA Information Network that allows institutional branding and management. To use GW Alert a student or faculty member installs a program on his or her computer that runs in the background unless there is an active alert. When activated over the network, a crawler runs across the bottom of the computer screen to inform users of emergency situations. Although the program adds extra time to a computer's startup, it is not noticeable when running.
Finally, reflecting their urban character where a large number of undergraduates live in university housing, GW is adopting a third strategy to drive alerts to individual residence hall rooms as part of an upgrade of the campus cable TV plant to integrated voice, video, and data.
What Should a Campus Do?
While each campus is unique and must develop an emergency alert system that is consistent with campus demographics, geography, politics, and culture, every campus can benefit from the work of others. Review what other campuses have done. What worked? What didn't work? Look at their studies and plans. Talk to vendors. Look through the emergency alert thread in the Educause April 2008 Security Discussion Group.
"There is no such thing as luck. There is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe." Robert Heinlein.
Doug Gale is president of Information Technology Associates, LLC (www.it associates.org) an IT consultancy specializing in higher education. He has more than 30 years of experience in higher education as a faculty member, CIO, and research administrator.
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