The SMS message was short and sweet referring people to the website. The website just showed the successful test reports from the day before, so it was weird and conflicting until I saw the email which included a few more details.

I am sure that this is an obvious mistake that would be fixed in the future though. Someone has to be looking at the traffic logs for http://www.indianauniversity.info/ and notice the bell curve happening right after the message goes out, not hours after.

Cheers!

First, emergency is defined by its context as much as the action and the potential threat. That’s a great insight about considering where people are when an event takes place. Something that might be elevated to emergency while class is in session may just be news as everyone sleeps into the weekend.

Second, while I do pay attention to IDS and HT feeds, as well as what OTHER people are paying attention to through Twitter, in those channels it might be easier to dismiss the attack than it was with a brand new emergency channel. I have already tuned out the Obama texts after the botched VP announcement, so I do have a concern that any short-term benefit to being aware of this particular attack has a long-term consequence of lowering my expectation for the importance of the next message.

Thanks for the comments.

My own perception of the system is that it would be used in the case of a Virginia Tech incident, or even a partial campus evacuation with a hazmat crash along the bypass like we had years ago. If we compare and contrast the scenarios, 2 major points come up: first is that the notice was 5 hours too late to be of any good from a safety perspective, and second the impact is relatively small given the time of night.

So, the delay issues need to be fixed regardless of where the bar is set for what triggers an alert. When I signed up for IU-Notify, my confirmation message came a week later, so 5 hours is an improvement.

That leaves us with the criteria for an “emergency”. In my opinion a lot of it has to do with whether the campus is open or not. At 12:30 AM, most lecture halls are closed and a majority of people are gone. This limits the impact of an attack. I could see the justification behind using the system if this individual case were about 3 people randomly attacked in different places, hinting at more to come, but this was a single incident at a single place (not to belittle the incident itself and how messed up it is that it happened). If the single-incidents are intended to be published this way, I will have to rethink my subscription.

This brings up another point, would many of us known about this random attacker if it were not through IU-notify? I don’t pay enough attention to the IDS or HT to see something like this pop up in the news, so it seems like IU-notify has helped to publicize the crime. Sad as it is there are people out there who will cause incidents just for the triggered publicity, even if they do remain anonymous. All the more reason we need to think harder about what justifies a notification.

Thanks for taking the time to bring this up! Glad to see I’m not the only one scratching my head from this.

Cheers