On Friday, Indiana University tested its emergency notification channel. Like other universities, this system is largely a response to the tragic shootings on the Virginia Tech campus a year ago.
IU-Notify was first tested last December, a couple months after Purdue conducted similar tests. IU-Notify allows students, faculty and staff to self-select which means of notification—if any—the University will use to communicate emergency situations that are an immediate threat to the community. Thanks to a reminder tweet from a friend, I made sure my information was updated for the test.
I got my cell phone call at 11:42a on Friday. The system also called my home number. Ten minutes later, my personal email address received the test message. Twenty minutes after that, my IU email got a notice, not long after sirens sounded and a booming voice informed the campus of the faux emergency.
In that span, there were eleven tweets in my Twitter stream related to the system test.
On Friday, Indiana tested the IU-Notify emergency system
Of some concern is the gap in reporting. Without offering up my phone and personal email, I would have heard the sirens before getting the email, well after the start of the alert process. It is possible (even likely) that IU-Notify was purposely rolling notifications, and therefore nothing should be read into the gaps. Still, the purpose of such a system is not to showcase the engineering; it is to provide critical knowledge and reassurance that the official response is happening quickly.
What is an Emergency?
A half day after the test, IU-Notify was about to be put to use. A man reportedly assaulted some students on 17th street after midnight early Saturday morning. The injured parties had been to the hospital and talked to the police before someone pushed the button to send a “cautionary message” to the campus community.
Clearly, this first real test of the system was not well received.
IU-Notify was quickly put to the test
Someone from my Twitter network wondered if the system will also be used “to notify us about passed out undergrads laying on sidewalks after tailgating all day.”
There are about 300 known local Twitter users, about half of which represent the transient population of students. Even with a small (but growing) footprint, Twitter was the first point of notification last October when a “sniper” gunned down some law books from atop a west side apartment building. Although that incident turned out to be minor, Bloomington and campus officials certainly would have been able to use IU-Notify to disseminate information about the rerouted bus lines and provide situational updates until the immediate danger decreased.
As frightening as an assault is, unless it is happening serially with a perceived immediate threat to more than isolated victims, it probably isn’t an emergency for IU-Notify. Sadly, there were 92 such assaults and 171 violent crimes in Bloomington in 2005. A case might be made for announcing attempted rapes, which have a greater propensity toward serial actions than assault, but even then there should be some fairly high bar for a threat to be disseminated with 5am text messages. The best use of IU-Notify might be to try not to use it.
The news of the attack is still fresh, so there is a chance that the notification was a good call, that someone now aware of the danger at large will be saved through that knowledge. However, even in that unlikely case, the notice came five hours after the attack during a time of day when the vast majority of people are asleep. What good could it possibly do?
5 replies on “IU-Notify”
So yeah, one more of these and I will probably pull my sms subscription to iu-notify. When I wake up like that I just can’t get back to sleep. You did a good job of pointing out that there will be MANY assaults like this throughout the year if we look at past police reports.
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
You bring up two excellent points I hadn’t considered.
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.
On the positive side, its good for students who are just now returning or coming to campus for the first time to be reminded of the threats and the need to watch your back at night. Maybe by over-exaggerating a night time pedestrian attack, people will practice a little caution in the school year to come.
Also I think it is important to note (in case your post makes it to the decision makers) that in the case of a real emergency when you give a link for people to turn to for details, then by golly that link should already have the details up BEFORE the message goes out.. not hours later like what happened this morning.
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!
[…] IU-Notify BlogSchmog – September 6, 2008 My cell phone rang at 11:42a on Friday. Over the next twenty minutes, I received two notification emails and heard sirens. Indiana University had successfully alerted the campus to a faux emergency… » where: Attach this Story to a Place! what: in the news · cell phones · testing · assault · threats warnings · bloomington · notification · email · indiana university · text messages · caution · twitter · campus security · blogschmog · 47408 · of course · emergency channel · iu-notify […]