Writing short alarm messages

A matter of education, training and practice

Conference paper (2013)

Authors

Department
Values and Technology (TPM) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2014 Taylor & Francis Group, London, UK. Used with permission
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Published Date

29-09-2013

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Source:

ESREL 2013: Proceedings of the 22nd European Safety and Reliability Conference "Safety, Reliability and Risk Analysis: Beyond the Horizon", Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 29 september-2 oktober 2013

Faculty

Technology, Policy and Management

Department

Values and Technology

Abstract

The Netherlands has a new tool to alarm and inform the population in case of crises. NL-Alert can simultaneously draw people’s attention and explain the crisis matter. The use requires determining of both the impact area and the alarm text. This raises questions about required knowledge and expertise to compose messages. Current experiences are mainly based on communication aimed at educating about potential future crisis. Composing a textual message in limited time to alarm the population is a different job. A good message meets three criteria: completeness (description of threat, location and action), relevance (receiver can determine if alarm is intended for him/her) and correctness given situation. TU Delft analysed messages composed by experts and laypeople on length, content, structure and readability. Results show anyone can compose an alarm message, the difficulty lie in decision on deployment and being able to gather information for the correct and relevant message content.

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