Comment of Note

It comes from our very first comment ever and was offered by Dean Siebold in response to this post. Says Dean:

​On communication
At first read off the top of my head I am agreeable to your upgrade to Sandmans equation. However, I rarely saw the PIO person as very often having a valid allegiance to those affected while in the higher coe/rh zone. Granted its a tough place for PIO's to operate but some of us live and work there for decades. Of those affected that have a greater working knowledge of the agency's abilities (through past exposure or other experience) often disdain the PIO as the fake news mouthpiece of the fire team. Those people are often the most helpful during a short handed fast changing crisis but not untill they are won over with some honest pacing that makes them feel heard and given some kind of bone that makes them feel some vindication. 
Most of the high outrage I have had to deal with to do my job as a fireman stemmed from poor dis connected communications from the formerly not outraged locals, and the hands on tactical tire meets the road line people and supervisors that often have good valid historical and situational intel to share that Fails to be punctual to planning ops meetings. This failure is the catalyst for much outrage and has stood out in my mind after the last few years tours as a problem that needs to be improved. I was faced with the need to overcome this failure after the fact on many occasions as one of the last firemen on scene after the smoke cleared after a long extended fire. There is always a lot of property loss that could have been prevented with better communications. 
I was excitedly hopeful when I heard a directive given in a daily operational briefing to " download your intell , and field observations at the end of shift. I was thinking that the information was flowing as I fantasied it should in this e-age. I asked how this was done and I was crushed to hear it was just ivyleage slang for a verbal breifing to relief crews. Vital intel is still slow as a snail and scribbled on unit logs and maybe read or not same as in LFO days before ICS. The myrad of saucer eyed trainees in field ops supervision are much too over their head with logistical complexities to really pass on the vast intell that their subs have for them. 
Some type of electronic pipeline should be explored and developed to give a voice to the outraged local before they are outraged as well as the inside intell from the savy hotshot foreman/jumper/engine boss and the other hotline forces that live a workaday life in that crisis zone and accept that very little reality actually gets in to planning ops in time to mitigate the plan. 
Perhaps the Garmin "In-Reach "sattellite texting app could be used to get the Situations Unit updated in real time with the big load of short shelf life current critical intell before it has expired could be tried.

My eyes have never been the same.

 There are many good points here. Let me start with the allegiance question. My post was ultimately aspirational. One of the aims of this blog is to look at where we are in doctrine and thought and to help massage those to create a stronger culture for PIOs within the IMT world and to provide an understanding of PIO work and stresses to those outside of incident response--to include agency leadership. The reason I like Sandman's approach is that it provides an easily understood way to communicate the differences and assert the rationale for a PIO as distinct from PAOs and PR types. If we can't describe what makes PIOs different, how can we expect ourselves and others (both within the response community and outside it) to both see and understand the difference? If PIOs cannot stake out a place that is their own, others will demand they be in a different place.

The culture since my first PIO years, where we were thought of as buffers for the IMT, lessers, and annoyances, has changed greatly for the better.  Yet we all agree the potential has not been met. And it won't be until we identify what sets us apart and continually show the critical work we do.

On the communications and intel front, we are quite possibly in the very worst of worlds right now. We can clearly see the problems that need to be addressed and we clearly see the possibilities of addressing those problems, but the capacity and capabilities aren't quite there yet. It's like the PC market when I was writing my MA thesis on a Compaq portable long ago. A 2011 study in the journal Science showed that the rate of change of the world's capacity to compute information is roughly 60% more than possibly could have been executed by all existing general-purpose computers in the year before. If that number is still holding, we are on an exponential curve and you have to believe that the technology will be cheaper and more ubiquitous soon.

But that poses new challenges. How do we drink from that firehose of data? How do we make sense of it? What is really important? How do we communicate it? What do we do with an "outraged local" who misinterprets some of that data? What happens when something goes wrong and a lawyer makes a case based on a data point instead of the big picture that led to critical decisions? Will we need to reconfigure IMT positions to account for both the data increase and the sense-making of that data? It will certainly demand a an increase in capital to get us where we need to be.

I think firefighting is still more art based on experience than science but there are a lot of forces trying to drive us to science and data acquisition and automation are but two. We will have to be measured in how we reach the admirable future you describe. 

Thanks for the comment. If we ever end up in camp together, I'll carry your salad.
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​Jim

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