What Does the Renewed WICEN WA Look Like? — A Members' Discussion Paper
What Does the Renewed WICEN WA Look Like?
A discussion paper for members
This paper is a draft for discussion. It is not a decision, a plan, or a policy — it’s a set of questions the committee needs member input on before the PACE Plan can be finished. Read it, disagree with it, bring your own answers to a meeting. That’s the point of it.
Why this paper exists
Work is underway drafting WICEN WA’s PACE (Primary/Alternate/Contingency/Emergency) communications plan — the document that’s meant to describe how WICEN WA communicates during an activation. Partway through that work, it became clear the plan couldn’t honestly be finished without answering a bigger question first: what is WICEN WA actually for, and what does the renewed version of it look like?
That’s not a question the plan can answer by itself, and it’s not one the committee should answer alone either. It’s a question for the whole membership, because the answer determines what we train for, what we spend money on, and what we ask of each other’s time.
Everything below grew out of drafting the PACE plan, but none of it is really about radio technology. It’s about what kind of organisation we’re rebuilding.
1. What has WICEN WA actually been doing?
Our own published record gives a clear, checkable answer — clearer than most of us probably assumed. Looking at every post on the WICEN WA website over the past eighteen months: two were about supporting the Dementia Walk, one was an amateur radio contest, one was a training day combining Parks on the Air with emcomm practice (about nine of us, at Herrison Island), two were governance meetings, and one was about a newly-discovered frequency allocation.
None of them were an actual emergency deployment.
That’s not a criticism — those events built real skills and real community goodwill, and they’re exactly the kind of thing a rebuilding club can sustain. But our “About” page lists five things WICEN WA does — emergency communications support, event support, training, equipment, rapid response — as if they’re equally weighted. Our actual activity says otherwise. Right now, we are, in practice, an event-support and training club that aspires to be an emergency-response auxiliary.
That gap between what we say we are and what we’ve actually been doing isn’t a flaw to hide — it’s the honest starting point for this whole conversation.
Questions for you: Is this the shape you want WICEN WA to have? And for anyone who’s been around longer than the last eighteen months — has WICEN WA’s activity always looked mostly like this, or is the current pattern specific to the rebuild?
2. What could WICEN WA become? Four shapes, not one
Looking at how comparable organisations operate — other Australian WICEN groups, the US’s ARES, and others — there isn’t one “correct” model for a volunteer emcomm organisation. There are a few genuinely different ones, and they lead to different training priorities and different asks of members’ time:
An event-support and training club. What we already do. Regular, low-stakes, sociable, builds operating skill. Doesn’t by itself build genuine emergency-response readiness — a Sunday at a fun run doesn’t test net discipline under real pressure the way an actual multi-day deployment does.
A served-agency emergency auxiliary. The traditional model — a standing relationship with DFES, SES, or similar, on-call readiness, integration with AIIMS (the incident management system every Australian fire and emergency agency uses), and a higher, more consistent training bar. This is what our own mission statement describes — but as Section 1 shows, it’s not what we’ve actually been doing lately.
A community-resilience organisation. A different idea entirely: less about plugging into agencies, more about helping our own neighbourhoods and the wider public directly — passing basic “we’re safe” messages when phones and internet are down, for instance. Research turned up a 2014 Australian study showing that people hearing from their neighbours during a flood or bushfire were far more likely to actually prepare than people relying on TV and radio broadcasts alone. That’s a real, evidenced need — and it’s a genuinely different skill set (community engagement, not just net control).
A staged combination. Deliberately be the event-support club now, while working toward the served-agency model as membership grows, picking up cheap pieces of the community-resilience idea along the way. This is the model the draft planning currently assumes by default — but nobody has actually agreed to it.
Question for you: Which of these is the WICEN WA you’d want to be part of — or is it some other combination entirely?
3. Are we actually recognised as part of WA’s emergency response?
This one surprised us. Western Australia’s state emergency management system — the State Emergency Management Committee (SEMC), under the Emergency Management Act 2005 — has a defined membership: WA Health, WA Police, DFES, Department of Communities, and others. WICEN WA is not on it. The state’s own document for how public warnings and information get distributed doesn’t mention us either.
Compare that to Victoria, where WICEN has a formal, published role statement inside Emergency Management Victoria’s own state emergency plan — an actual named role in the state’s official documentation, not just an understanding between committees.
If the answer to Section 2 is “we want to be a genuine served-agency auxiliary,” this is where that has to start. Training and equipment don’t create that relationship — formal recognition does, and right now we don’t have it.
Question for you: Is pursuing that kind of formal recognition — a WICEN WA role statement, the way Victoria has one — something worth the committee actively chasing? It’s likely a multi-year relationship-building effort, not a paperwork exercise.
4. Do we actually have the people?
The largest gathering in our own recent record was around nine people, at a training day. The draft PACE plan, as currently written, assumes simultaneous roles across state-wide coordination, long-range HF traffic, local field teams, and interstate liaison — Net Control, Winlink operators, field HF stations, and more, often all at once.
Before we decide what WICEN WA should aim for, we need an honest headcount: how many of us are actually trained and genuinely available for a multi-day commitment, not just a single Sunday? Whatever model the membership picks in Section 2, it has to be one this many people can actually deliver — not one that looks good on paper.
Question for you: If you had to be honest about it — could you commit to a multi-day deployment if WICEN WA were activated tomorrow? What would need to change for you to be able to say yes?
5. More than agencies: our own community, friends, and family
Everything above is about WICEN’s relationship with agencies and incidents. There’s a separate, quieter idea worth putting on the table: what about the people who aren’t served by any agency at all — our own neighbours, friends, and family, when a community is genuinely cut off?
Australian Red Cross runs Register.Find.Reunite, the service that helps reunite people after a disaster — but it needs internet or mobile access, or a trip to an evacuation centre. A community that’s truly cut off, which is exactly the scenario our Emergency-tier planning already assumes, has no way to reach it. In the US, this is a long-established amateur radio role: a ham inside a disaster area passes a basic “I’m safe” message out to a ham who isn’t, who then gets it to family or into the official system. Nothing like that formally exists here yet.
This wouldn’t need to be a big investment — it mostly reuses skills and radio systems WICEN already has. What it needs is a decision that WICEN WA actually wants this as part of who we are.
Question for you: Does this belong in WICEN WA’s future — a direct, public-facing welfare role, separate from anything an agency asks us to do?
6. What tools do we actually use?
Some recent draft work leaned heavily on one particular technology (MeshCore, a newer mesh-radio system) before really comparing it to the alternatives WICEN operators already have — which was a fair thing for a member to flag, and worth correcting properly rather than just picking a different single winner.
The better way to think about it: these technologies don’t compete with each other, because they solve different problems.
Some exist specifically to let a non-ham get a message into our system at all — MeshCore and UHF CB both work without an amateur licence, which matters if we ever want the general public to be able to reach us directly during an emergency.
Others are purely for WICEN operator to WICEN operator — APRS messaging (which some of us are already trained on) and AREDN (a higher-capability WiFi-based mesh network, but more setup and cost).
And separately again — some of this should be permanent, standing infrastructure that’s just always there, and some should be portable kit carried to wherever it’s needed. We’re not starting from nothing here either: South West WA already has a working APRS digipeater network, and there’s an expanding MeshCore coverage area already growing, neither of which WICEN had to build.
Questions for you: Do we want a way for non-members to reach us at all? Which of these layers is worth building first, given we’re a small club right now? And does anyone have a fuller picture of what local radio infrastructure already exists that the rest of us don’t know about?
7. Bigger investments — and who pays for them
Two bigger ideas came up worth putting to the membership honestly, because both cost real money:
A mobile repeater with radios to hand out to non-hams — genuinely useful for reaching the public directly, but it needs its own radio-spectrum licence and ongoing cost, on top of the hardware.
Ad-hoc satellite internet (like Starlink) for community connectivity — not far-fetched; NSW SES and NSW RFS are already doing this at scale. But it’s a real subscription cost, and it would change how we think about what “Primary” communications even means if we can restore internet access in the field ourselves.
Given we’re rebuilding, both of these are probably not “do it this year” items — but they might be worth pursuing jointly with an agency, rather than assuming WICEN pays for either alone.
Question for you: Are either of these worth planning toward now, or are they honestly a few years away?
8. Getting our own house in order
Less exciting, but arguably the most immediately useful finding: WICEN WA doesn’t currently have any documented practice for logging — who said what, when, on a net — beyond the message format itself. Net Control, as a role, didn’t have any logging responsibility written down anywhere until this review. That’s a real, practical gap, and unlike most of what’s above, it costs nothing to fix.
Question for you: Would anyone be willing to trial a proper net-logging setup at our next few nets, rather than waiting for a bigger, busier activation to expose the gap the hard way?
Bringing it together
All of the sections above are really facets of one question: what does the renewed WICEN WA actually look like?
A small, sociable club that shows up for community walks and keeps its skills sharp? A genuine emergency-response auxiliary, formally recognised by the state, ready to deploy when DFES calls? An organisation that looks after its own members’ streets and families when the phones go down, agency or no agency? Some sequence through all three, starting small and growing deliberately?
There’s no wrong answer here — but there is a wrong process, which is the plan quietly assuming an answer nobody actually agreed to. That’s what this paper is trying to avoid.
For anyone who wants the full technical detail behind any of this, the working documents are public on the site: the PACE Plan Overview, the Domain Summary, the fuller Committee Discussion this paper is drawn from, and the proposed Implementation Roadmap. There’s also a first-draft Mission Statement and Aims, written on a working assumption about how these questions get answered — worth reading with that in mind. None of it is finished, and none of it should be, until this conversation has happened.
How to have your say
Bring your thoughts to the next general meeting, raise them on the mailing list or Discord, or contact the committee directly. This is genuinely open — the only thing that isn’t up for debate is that the committee shouldn’t be the only ones answering it.