By Dave Buchanan, FirstNet Director of Consultation

With the Initial State Consultations and 2015 data collection efforts complete, the FirstNet User Advocacy team moved forward this year with state single point of contact (SPOC) Engagement meetings. These meetings provided us with another opportunity to collect feedback from the states and territories about their progress, activities, and concerns with preparing for the FirstNet network. 

By completing 55 of these meetings between January and April of this year, we have reengaged with the SPOCs and their leadership teams to lay the groundwork for the remainder of our consultation activities in 2016. Our objectives for the rest of 2016 are to work together to prepare for both the Governor’s decision on Radio Access Network (RAN) deployment in each state or territory and on the network adoption decision that will be made by public safety users. Both matters depend on getting to the right individuals and groups of people together and uncovering their important issues and concerns.

Moving forward, our Consultation program for this year will focus on the following three key elements: Governance Body Consultation meetings, Consultation Task Teams, and Executive Consultation.  With this blog, I want to provide an update on the Governance Body Consultation meetings and direct you to the consultation map on our homepage, which has been updated to reflect our work with states and territories and their progress in this area.

To date, we have completed 12 Governance Body Consultation meetings, including several in the last couple of weeks with Oregon, Massachusetts, California, Louisiana, Rhode Island, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Alaska. These meetings have been valuable to FirstNet, allowing us to connect with the states on important issues like the State Plan and the Governor’s decision, and to have a dialog about the key influencers and key issues that the state and FirstNet need to consider over the next year.

In Massachusetts, for example, we had terrific discussions with SPOC Curt Wood and his team about the State Plan and Governor’s decision process, and learned more about the network topics important to Massachusetts public safety.

I encourage you to continue to refer to the consultation map, and refer to future blogs for additional updates on the progress states are making with the Governance Body Consultation meetings.

Thanks,
-Dave