Brainstorming! – CERT Emergency Communications Plan

We gathered as group at the training room in the local fire station. This was great venue with whiteboards and plenty of room to spread out.

Great team contributions
  1. Introduction
    • Participants – everyone introduced themselves
    • Plan for the morning
    • Go through the rules for brainstorming
      • Capture ideas as we go
      • No analysis or critiquing idea, instead just let the ideas flow. It is good to build on ideas
    • Looked at the buckets and challenge / specific questions
  2. Review the brainwriting results – quickly went through all of the brainwriting ideas
  3. Brainstorming session – after the first idea went out, this group really took off with ideas. We posted stickies with written ideas on the white board and grouped them by bucket.
  4. Analysis – we ended the brainstorming session. The next steps:
    • Everyone voted on their favorite ideas, working to identify ideas that we should explore
    • Talked about the highest priority ideas and looked for themes (ideas that grouped together around a common theme)
  5. Identified next steps and concluded the meeting

An enthusiastic group that really wants to find better ways to help out in the community during an emergency really made this morning a joy.

Here are some images of the ideas on the white board.

Results

Between the brainwriting and the brainstorming, the team generated over 140 ideas! Many of the ideas were very high quality. There is lots of interest in pursuing those ideas in the wild and turning them into actionable plans.

Thanks to everyone who participated.

We’ll publish detailed results in a separate blog post, or 2 or 3, where we can look at them in detail. The ideas and the themes we discovered are all helpful.

Starting Our Journey – Developing Our CERT Emergency Communications Plan

Click on the play button to listen

Our local CERT team is working on a communications plan to cover 2 very different situations:

  1. deployed in an emergency
  2. not deployed, most likely in a longer term emergency or a grid down situation

CERT means Community Emergency Response Team. There are CERT teams across the United States.

We are going to document our work so others can leverage our work and make developing a communications plan easier for other groups. We hope to use standard innovation tools to use the knowledge within our local community. These tools include:

– brainwriting
– brainstorming

Our approach, ideas, and research can help you develop a plan for your local community or other group. Maybe even your family emergency communications plan. We are looking at incorporating the communications elements that we have available to our members:

  • CB radio
  • MURS, GMRS, and FRS radios
  • Ham frequencies, repeaters and digital technologies
  • Internet options such as Zello
  • Other options we haven’t even thought of yet
  • LoRa Meshtastic

Join us on the journey. Just listen to the podcast to follow along!

Thanks
Montie
KO4NQF