The Canadian Association for Public Alerting and Notification

The Canadian Association for Public Alerting and Notification (www.CAPAN.ca) is a national not for profit association for public safety officials, their suppliers, and communications companies. It was established to promote and support the use of open structured data standards, within open emergency management systems, to issue, aggregate, and distribute alerts within the emergency management community, and with communications companies that serve the Canadian public.

CAPAN was prepared to fulfill the “public alerting” aggregation role Pelmorex (The Weather Network) will serve with the new National Alert Aggregation and Dissemination (NAAD) system (launches June 2010), in combination with what is now known as the multi-agency situational awareness system (MASAS) initiative. Both use the Common Alerting Protocol – Canadian Profile (CAP-CP), and can be fully operable with the single US system that fulfills both NAAD and MASAS functions. CAPAN remains the leading candidate to operate a national MASAS.

CAPAN’s costs are to be recovered through a distributed cost model, whereby the agencies using CAPAN services and systems cover their own nominal costs associated with administration, education, training, etc. of what can be a rather inexpensive system. Governance options remain flexible to the needs of the community. Ex. Canadian Health Infoway, a national not for profit overseen by senior Federal, Provincial and Territorial health officials.