E911: Should the 'E' Stand for Easy?

Sometimes I just get lucky. For example, last week I was coming back on a train from the District (a.k.a Washington DC) and it so happened that I was on the train with Vint Cerf from Google. 

I reintroduced myself to him and proceeded to discuss various aspects of the industry, particularly about some of the problems with migration to an all IP marketplace.

As it often happens, that brought us to the subject of E911. Vint made the statement that 911 should not be about the number particularly on your smartphone, but rather it should be “easy.” As he talked about it, I found myself thinking about Staple’s easy button.

It’s amazing how unaware I am to my own myopia. Here are the thoughts that came up after talking to Vint:

Why should “911” be so Boolean as to be only about a crisis? After all I am saturated with posters and commercials that say, “If you see something, say something.” All that advertising with a call to action, but no real guidance as to how to say something. What if the easy button existing was for “say something?” And that could be connected to a local dispatch. It changes the dynamics considerably.

Secondly, should 911 be so specific as to only include “real” emergencies? This brings up two threads of thought, but let’s stay with the easy 911 concept and realize that after 9/11/2001 our expectations of real emergencies went up a few notches. The original 911 network was built as a prioritization tool within the PSTN. It was expected to roll out local services to avert or assist in a crisis. 

What if the emergency network was redesigned to more reflect the age we live in? For example, local dispatch might not be the right place to look for aid and emergency services that could all be attached to the 911 network. I am not suggesting that we add an IVR to 911 that adds the ‘press 1 for police, 2 for fire, 3 for ambulance,’ etc. But I am suggesting that 911 could be better connected and networked to national, state and local services and after dispatch answers the system could include more services. Additionally, in the surveillance mode the system could support more analytics that would better pick up patterns.

The other thread is how analogous E911 is to problems we face with migrating the network away from POTS. There is a richer world of media including text, video and the Web that is not particularly easy to bring to 911. And by trying to make 911 work on VoIP we are missing the bigger picture that 911 should be easy for the other media and not so number centric.

Trying to migrate from the legacy system we are keeping the concept of a dispatcher at a PSAP as opposed to making it so that the information is available to a variety of resources including those tasked with coming to the place of the incident. Any to Many would be the way to describe this change in “call”/data flow.

Your contact list may include emergency numbers that you can broadcast to and may include them as email. Perhaps what we should do is just make an application for emergency services.

Now that would make it easy.