Governments and public authorities increasingly publish official public alerts in the international standard format Common Alerting Protocol (CAP). These official CAP alerts can be accessed and republished through the Internet in near-real time.  The worldwide availability of CAP alerts on the Internet is enabling a growing trend: private-sector and civil-society actors voluntarily extend the reach of official public alerts to people who use their services. Herein, this is called Voluntary Public Alerting (VPA).

VPA complements regulated public alerting systems. A VPA provider need not have formal arrangements with alerting authorities once official alerts are freely published. The VPA provider accesses official CAP alerts from an authoritative source, determines whether the alerting area applies to its users, and voluntarily presents or delivers the official public alert through its service.

Traditional public-alerting governance is largely organized around governments, public alerting authorities, broadcasters, telecommunications operators and disaster-management institutions. VPA calls attention to the increasingly important role of Internet services that are not traditionally part of public alerting infrastructures.

The emergence of VPA raises important Internet-governance questions regarding data integrity, network resilience, trust, and inclusion.  The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) provides a natural environment for bringing these communities together to examine how existing Internet governance principles, practices, and institutions apply to this evolving development. The IGF can bring together the relevant Internet, telecommunications, technical, geospatial, artificial-intelligence, civil-society, accessibility and public-sector communities. The central question for the DC-VPA will be:

What principles, practices and governance considerations are relevant when Internet services
voluntarily extend the reach of official public alerts?

The question arises at the intersection of public alerting and the Internet. A single official public alert may move from an authoritative public agency through Internet infrastructure to many independent services, each with different technologies, responsibilities and users.

The IGF Dynamic Coalition on VPA (DC-VPA) will provide a forum to examine this situation, fully recognizing the roles of official alerting authorities and avoiding unnecessary obligations on voluntary services.

The purpose of the DC-VPA is not to create new Internet governance or to establish a new regulatory framework. Rather, it will provide a multistakeholder forum to examine how existing Internet governance principles apply to VPA in practice, and where the experience of VPA may illuminate issues of broader relevance to the Internet community. The DC-VPA will complement, rather than duplicate, organizations whose primary mandates concern particular types of hazard threats, telecommunications, disaster risk reduction, emergency management, or standards. 

The DC-VPA will be guided by the following principles:

Official authority remains with the issuing authority. A VPA provider does not act as an alerting authority merely by republishing an official CAP alert.

Voluntary participation. VPA does not create a regulatory obligation for private sector or civil society services to disseminate public alerts.

Clarity of source and key facts. The issuing authority and the key facts in the official public alert must remain clear when the alerts are presented through VPA services.

Complementarity. VPA must complement regulated public-alerting channels rather than replace or overshadow them.

Openness and interoperability. Open standards and interoperable mechanisms will be favored.

Accessibility and inclusion. VPA seeks to make official public alerts accessible as broadly as reasonably possible.

Respect for privacy. VPA must use privacy-preserving approaches to geographic targeting.