2023-2024 NET Program Changes

.THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION AND NOT FINAL..

Jeremy Van Keuren here.

This is a "read ahead" page for NET volunteers and others reviewing proposed changes to the Portland NET program. A feedback survey link will be posted to this page after the presentation on November 8, 2023.

BACKGROUND: The case for making changes to the NET program

Both PBEM and the City of Portland are undergoing (and undertaking) the most sweeping bureaucratic changes seen in decades. This is resulting in reprioritizing and movement of resources, and that does impact NET programming directly. Expanding our view beyond City government and into the sociological, the COVID pandemic and climate change has made permanent changes to how we view disaster, resilience, and community organizing.

People are accustomed to meeting and organizing on virtual platforms

It's difficult to believe that before the pandemic, virtual meetings were still a relative novelty. Sure, we had Skype (remember them?) but that was more often used to connect with your granny living thousands of miles away. Today, we're meeting over Zoom with people sitting literally in the next room.

From the NET community organizing perspective, there are both pros and cons to plan around. On the plus side, meeting online reduces obstacles to NET participation. Where a parent used to have to book childcare to take part in a NET meeting, now they can join online. Where someone who doesn't speak English fluently might feel self conscious requesting live interpretation, it's simpler for PBEM to detail a live interpreter to an online meeting. Where a less committed ATV might groan at the prospect of getting off the couch to go meet with neighbors, joining online may feel more palatable. And so on.

There are a few problems as well:

• There's an old saw that 80% of communication is nonverbal. That may oversimplify thing a bit, but the notion is still relevant. Even if online communication doesn't deaden nonverbal communication it does stymie it. Blotting nonverbal communication makes misunderstandings and misfired social behaviors more likely.
• AI bots are taking notes. Some of you may have noticed that folks are sending surrogate bots to take notes instead of arriving themselves. I think any reasonable person would agree that doesn't constitute "active participation". But it's better than not participating at all.
• Virtual meetings make hands-on team training more challenging, though certainly not impossible.

My position is that meeting online is not as good as meeting in person, but that online meetings are here to stay and teams should accommodate neighbors who need to use it. PBEM recommends that NET teams, team leaders, and PBEM address challenges:

1. PBEM should help develop best practices for NETs to do hybrid meetings. Hybrid meetings are still challenging, but they're getting easier.
2. PBEM encourages each team to get their own free Google Meet account. PBEM can no longer support a paid Zoom account for NET (though we are retaining a single Zoom account that NETs might use for exceptionally large, long, or complicated meetings).
3. NET Team Leaders should accept that not all volunteers (active NET/BEECN/ATV) will participate in person. But they can/should reasonably request occasional "all hands" in person meetings.
4. PBEM should work with NETs/FPN to develop team training/exercise curriculum that can work for online and hybrid audiences.

The urgency of climate change resilience is supplanting earthquake resilience in Portland

NET is an all-hazards response resource and responding to the threat of a CSZ earthquake will always be the standard PBEM wants to train NETs to. But an earthquake hasn't killed anyone in Oregon for at least three centuries. Meanwhile, extreme weather events in Oregon linked to climate change, such as the 2021 heat dome, have killed hundreds and contribute to ongoing health problems for many.

NET doesn't need to "choose" between preparing for an earthquake and climate change resilience, so we won't. But, NET training and outreach should reflect and incorporate the threats posed by extreme weather events.

• PBEM should offer a proportionally appropriate number of training events relevant to extreme weather event response and climate change resilience. This might include shelter response training, polishing training for heat illness response, outreach, and more.

Neighborhood-based response teams exist for no other purpose than to respond to an earthquake

Every NET deployment since 1994 has been centralized through PBEM. PBEM sets the volunteer position descriptions, the shift schedules, and the NETs ultimately report to PBEM. The reason is that, per NET Guidelines, NETs will only self deploy if there is a citywide disaster and routine communication systems are disabled. In other words: an earthquake.

This realization opens a few other implications that help us organize our work:

1. Teams of NET volunteers exist really for only two reasons: for local self deployment after an earthquake, and for socializing/training together.
2. NET "Operations Plans" are really "Earthquake Plans".

Inside of NET are some problems that need solving (some widely recognized and some not). The NET program has a few long standing creaky problems that should be addressed, and changes are happening (at both the PBEM bureau level and the City government level) that open opportunities and create change factors we should move on. To wit:

1.) ISSUE: Not all 2,100 volunteers listed as "active" are actually active; we estimate only around 800 volunteers are active. This creates a problem because it inflates our planned response capacity, demoralizes Team Leaders who wonder why nobody is showing up to meetings, and skews any program planning directly related or adjacent to Portland NET.

2.) ISSUE: NETs need clearer guidance and templates on Operations Planning. PBEM began requiring NETs to assemble Ops Plans in 2013, but a lack of clarity has led to products that are inconsistent in what they address and leave teams asking questions about their missions that PBEM has not sufficiently responded to.

Related problem: Service area boundaries make no sense. For years now, a NET's service area boundaries conform to neighborhood association boundaries. However, those boundaries do not fit with the post-earthquake response capacity available to most teams of NETs.

3.) ISSUE: NETs have only ever been deployed through PBEM-managed centralized deployments, ops plans have never been used. Since NET started in 1994, there has never been an emergency for which NETs self-deployed and activated a team ops plan. And in fact, every deployment has been PBEM directing NETs on where to go and what to do (even if that response was on a small neighborhood scale, such as putting up a perimeter around a down power line). And in fact, the only kind of disaster imaginable that would prompt NETs to self deploy and use an ops plan is a catastrophic city-scale disaster that also brought down routine communications...in other words, an earthquake.

4.) ISSUE: NET meeting attendance is consistently low. There are probably many reasons for this. But what seems readily apparent is that people have busy lives, and that teams have a lack of direction because there is a lack of direction around operations plans.

5.) ISSUE: NETs want neighborhood scale response planning, but also want to preserve the community/social aspects and training aspects of Portland NET.

What are the proposed solutions?

In order, we propose:

1. In the NET Guidelines, simplify and toss out the distinctions between "PBEM Initiated Deployments", "Self Deployments", and "Standing Orders". Replace with rules governing "Centralized Deployments" and "Earthquake Deployment".
2. Dispense with the term "Operations Plans" and call them "Earthquake Plans" to reflect what the plan is actually for and to help put NETs in the mindset of forming a plan around earthquake response.
3. Using GIS, allow Teams to decide on service area boundaries that reflect the response area they want to/feel comfortable responding inside of after an earthquake.
4. Give NET volunteers the option of participating in earthquake planning in their neighborhoods if they choose to; active NETs do not have to, and all NETs can still participate in centralized deployments.
   • Earthquake planning teams can meet in person (preferred) or through online meetings.
   • Earthquake teams can bring in non-NETs (ATVs)
   • There will be a series of planning milestones for earthquake teams, for example:
     • Decide on (and get approval for) service area boundaries and have them published to the NET map
     • Decide on radio frequencies
     • Capacity assessment
     • Capacity planning (which VSFs and how many)
     • Neighborhood outreach
     • Assembling a roster
5. Two types of teams: an earthquake planning team (which includes non-NETs in the service area) and broader scale teams that meet for socializing/community outreach/training events.

Emphasize development of most important VSFs: 02, 06, 08, 09, and 15. They conform with what we train in Basic, best suited to volunteers, already doing a lot of that stuff anyway.