The process of upgrading the Canadian Standards Association Z1600 standard for emergency management and business continuity programs has begun. For those who are using or plan to use this standard to evaluate and continuously improve their programs, this is an opportunity for you to provide your input.
CSA has a formal process whereby a technical committee develops recommended upgrades to a standard, then the standard with proposed revisions is published for public review, with all comments sent back to the technical committee for consideration and response. That is the formal process but there are opportunities to make recommendations for improvement as the technical committee is working on upgrades. This is one of them.
I am responsible to collect and present recommendations to upgrade section 6.6 Communication and Warning to the technical committee and our next teleconference to review these is scheduled for January 4th. There are already two items on PTSC-Online that should provide valuable input to this process. (1) An Analysis of CSA Z1600 and NFPA 1600 Communication and Warning Sections posted by Grey Burkart and (2) A Project to Advance Crisis and Emergency Communications Practices, posted by Patrice Cloutier which has just started and will unfold over the next few months. his project will place a special emphasis on the role of social media in emergency and crisis communication, a topic which is currently not addressed by the Z1600 section 6.6 standard and annex material. If this is of interest, you might want to follow and participate in this project as I expect it will be quite educational and provide you with useful tools and resources.
Commenting on or participating in either of the above items are ways you can make your thoughts known. Another way is to post a response to this blog article indicating changes you believe should be made to the communication and warning section. Please be as specific as you can about the recommended changes by stating the specific section or clause, how it reads now, your recommendations on how it should read and your rationale for the change. All comments will be appreciated.
This article was updated on December 18th by attaching the text of the CSA Z1600 section 6.6 communication and warning and the annex material which supports this section.
4 Comments
Do you have an online copy of Z1600 that can be reviewed for comment?
I unfortunately can not post a copy of Z1600 because of the copyright restrictions. Here is a link to where you can obtain a copy. I will follow up with Ron Meyers at CSA to see if I can obtain permission to post a copy of the communication and warning standard and annex sections for the purpose of soliciting comments and to support Patrice and Barry's crisis and emergency communications project.
Thank you Ron for your permission to post Z1600 section 6.6. It has now been posted as an attachment to the original article so it can be available to solicit comments and also to support the crisis and emergency communications practices project.
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