The websites below are either directly hosted by a public safety agency, or otherwise associated with an agency (or mulitple agencies). We recommend visiting these sites often, since they provide the "customer's" point of view.
FIRESCOPE is the state government administered program in California for decision-making regarding mutual aid, cooperative agreements and statewide fire/rescue policy issues. As such, it often addresses communication interoperability issues.
Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center has an extensive array of after-action reports, peer review, lessons learned, and "effective practices". This is frequently updated, so it has detailed reports of near-misses, injuries, and other safety issues you may have read about in the general media during this fire season. In a number of the incidents, communications is a contributing factor, if not a direct factor. For instance, read this report on a
mid-air near-miss.
Below is a selected list of associations that are involved either setting standards, or otherwise implementing and/or using interoperability in public safety communications. While some of the associations have magazines and other period publications (see above), many offer their information on their website, which are listed below.
APCO's online area for interoperability information.
California Fire Chief's Association's Communications Section - although focused on fire-fighting, good information for all types of incident dispatching.
National Association for Air Medical Communication Specialists.
NEMA (National Emergency Management Association) - the association for state emergency managers.
NENA (National Emergency Number Association) - PSAP focus, generally focused on call-taking as opposed to radio communications, non-profit.
National Tactical Officers Association - information, products, training for tactical/SWAT teams including communications.
National Incident Dispatchers Association (NIDA) - a new organization representing the incident dispatchers (e.g. fire, SWAT, etc.). Although incident dispatching has long precedence in wildland fire (as well as obvious equivalents in military deployments) it is a relatively new development in public safety communications.
NPSTC (National Public Safety Telecommunications Council) - involved in many aspects of public safety communications, and includes an interoperability committee.
