The Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau of the FCC will host a public workshop on Friday, June 28, to help inform state and local emergency management and planning authorities on actions they can take to implement multilingual alerts over the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) system.
The workshop will take place at FCC Headquarters, 445 12th St. SW, Washington, DC, from 9:00 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. in the Commission Meeting Room (TW-C305).
Zenji Nakazawa, Public Safety and Consumer Protection Advisor to Chairman Ajit Pai, will welcome attendees ahead of a panel at 9:15am on the regulatory framework for multilingual alert distribution over the EAS and WEA Systems.
Panelists will describe how the EAS and WEA rules support multilingual alerting, including both legacy (over-the-air) EAS alerts and those originating in the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) format for distribution through FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS).
The second panel, at 10:15am, will present examples of how state and local jurisdictions have implemented multilingual alerting and offer best practices for other jurisdictions. The discussion will also cover multilingual communications practices to supplement the EAS and WEA, such as leveraging the Internet, email, and social networking to deliver alert messages. In addition, the discussion will cover alternatives to the EAS and WEA for delivering emergency information to the non-English speaking public.
A third panel at 1pm will describe the capabilities of current technologies to facilitate multilingual alerting within the EAS and WEA architectures, and experiences in integrating multilingual alerting capabilities in large-area alerting systems.
Following these presentations, the panelists will take questions from the audience.
The event concludes at 2:30pm.
