Amateur Radio and Situational Awareness - A proposal

Amateur Radio is a distributed resource able to transmit messages when all other forms of communications fail. As such it is predestined to support situational awareness in times of emergencies.

FLDIGI is a suite of programs which allow easy sending and receipt of ICS (Incident Command System) Forms as developed by FEMA and the US Coast Guard. These structured messages should be well suited for ATOM or RSS feeds, due to their well known structure and common use in Incident Command Systems.

I thus propose that the data of ICS forms received by Amateur Radio Operators, be it that they provide service under ARES (the Amateur Radio Emergency Service) or as individuals who monitor the airwaves (for example the NBEMS Radio Assistance Network) be copied into individual blog entries, which in turn are offered as ATOM or RSS feeds, same as this blog on Blogger is available as an ATOM and RSS feed.
This presentation of data should also be extended to all other forms of more randomly received data from emergency areas, for example by entering it into an ICS-213 form, which lends itself to an open text entry.

This ATOM/ RSS data can then in turn be incorporated into Situational Awareness Maps.