CAP SC Meeting October 27, 2014
Meeting Attendees
CompanyNameRole
Canadian Association for PublicDoug AllportVoting Member
Alerting a...
IndividualArt BotterellMember
IndividualRex BrooksVoting Member
IndividualElysa JonesVoting Member
Environment CanadaNorm PaulsenVoting Member
Sahana Software FoundationNuwan WaidyanathaMember
IndividualJacob WestfallChair
A quorum of voting members was in attendance. Jacob Westfall chaired the meeting and acted as secretary. The meeting minutes from October 20 were reviewed. Rex Brooks moved to approve the minutes with no changes, Nuwan Waidyanatha seconded. The minutes were approved with all in favour.
The meeting began with a discussion of issue 22, regarding modifying responseType. Art Botterell provided some background information on the issue and the comments he had submitted. Automated systems needing responseType and protective actions being applicable to all alerts, were the key points he raised. Norm Paulsen raised a concern about distributor liability regarding any actions the public make be asked to take. Art noted that distributors should be transparent carriers of messages in order to remove any liability concerns. Jacob raised a concern that not all issuers would willing to provide a responseType for their messages if there was any uncertainty. Doug Allport discussed risk management concerns of public agencies. Art spoke about message templates and that default actions can be provided by those templates. He noted that CAP captures the limited set of actions that apply to a very wide range of circumstances.
Public alerting concerns within Canada were discussed by Art, Norm, and Doug. Jacob noted that a missing responseType element has a different intent than a responseType of None. The group agreed that the Monitor value was a better default value than None. Nuwan and Art discussed Prepare and how it related to the other values. Doug and Art discussed the various government goals when communicating alert information. Jacob noted that to change responseType to required should have a solid justification. Art provided some reasons such as encouraging good practice and being needed for filtering to allow recipients to decide, “so what”, about responding to alerts. Jacob pointed to the Urgency/Severity/Certainty values as being more important to filtering. Norm noted they play a part along with other key values such as eventCode. Jacob took an informal poll within the group to determine how best to move forward. A review of the RFC keywords took place.
The motion to change responseType from OPTIONAL to SHOULD, was put forward. Doug moved and it was seconded by Elysa. All agreed with the motion and it passed.
The motion to remove None from the list of responseType values, was put forward. Art moved and it was seconded by Doug. All agreed with the motion and it passed.
The motion to update the description of the Monitor value to indicate that it should be the default value, was put forward. Art moved and it was seconded by Rex. All agreed with the motion and it passed.
The review of issue 22 was completed. The meeting had run over time and discussion of issue 23 was postponed. The meeting concluded with Rex moving to adjourn and Elysa seconding, all in favour.