Draft Mission Statement and Aims

Mission Statement, Goals & Aims — A Draft for Discussion

This is a first draft, not an adopted statement. It should be revised once the Discussion Paper has actually been discussed — several of the aims below are written provisionally, on a working assumption about which direction the membership wants, and are flagged as such.

Mission Statement (draft)

WICEN WA is a volunteer organisation of licensed amateur radio operators, dedicated to providing emergency communications services to Western Australian communities and the agencies that serve them. We build and maintain trained, ready operators and resilient communications capability — through regular practice, community service, and formal readiness — for the times normal communications fail.

This keeps the current statement’s core claim (a trained network, ready to help when normal comms fail) but makes two changes worth flagging explicitly:

  • It names communities directly, not only “government agencies, emergency services, and the community” as a single trailing clause — because §5 and §6 of the Committee Discussion raised a genuine question about whether WICEN WA’s role extends beyond agency support, and a mission statement that already assumes “no” would quietly foreclose that before the membership has actually decided.
  • It says “through regular practice, community service, and formal readiness” — an honest acknowledgment that event support and training are part of how the mission gets delivered, not a distraction from it, which is closer to what §1’s post-history evidence actually shows WICEN WA doing.

It deliberately does not name specific agencies, technologies, or a target activation scale — that’s what the aims below are for, and it’s exactly the kind of detail a mission statement shouldn’t lock in.

Aims (draft)

Each of these is written to be checkable in a few years, not just aspirational. Several depend directly on which operating model the membership picks in Committee Discussion §1 — that dependency is noted for each one.

1. Rebuild a trained, available membership base. Grow beyond the roughly nine-person scale visible in WICEN WA’s largest recent activity to a membership that can genuinely staff the roles this plan assumes — Net Control, digital operators, field stations — simultaneously, not just individually. (Depends on: the capability headcount raised in Discussion §1 — this aim only means something once that number is actually known.)

2. Establish WICEN WA’s formal place in WA’s emergency management framework. Pursue the kind of recognition Victoria’s WICEN already has — a named role statement within the state’s own emergency management documentation — rather than relying on informal understanding with DFES or SES. (Depends on: the served-agency model being the direction chosen in §1; this aim doesn’t apply, or applies much less urgently, under a community-resilience-first or event-club-first model.)

3. Finish and exercise the PACE communications plan, domain by domain. Move each of the five domains in the Domain Summary from documented to actually drilled — starting with whichever domain the committee prioritises in Discussion §3 — rather than leaving Contingency and Emergency tiers undefined indefinitely.

4. Maintain WICEN WA’s existing strength: community event support and skills training. Whatever else changes, don’t lose what’s already working — the event support and training activity that’s been the bulk of WICEN WA’s real, lived activity. Continue it deliberately, not just by default because nothing else is happening yet.

5. Extend WICEN WA’s value directly to the public, not only to served agencies. (Provisional — depends entirely on Discussion §1 and §6’s outcome.) If the membership wants this, it means building a genuine welfare-messaging or community-facing capability, not just a served-agency auxiliary. If the membership doesn’t want this, this aim should be removed outright, not softened — a half-adopted aim is worse than no aim.

6. Put basic operating discipline in place — logging, message handling, a documented training pathway. The cheapest aim on this list, and the one with no real dependency on any of the model questions above. Covers the net-logging gap, the SITREP cycle, and turning the Capability Self-Assessment’s role list into an actual training pathway.

What would change this draft

This draft leans on the “staged hybrid” model that the Implementation Roadmap already assumes by default — build local capability and event-support strength now, work toward formal served-agency recognition as membership grows, and pick up community-facing work opportunistically. If the membership answers Discussion §1 differently, this draft needs real rework, not just a rename:

  • Event-club-first: Aim 2 (formal recognition) drops out or becomes long-term-only; Aim 4 becomes the clear top priority instead of a maintenance item.
  • Served-agency-first: Aim 1 (membership/capability) and Aim 2 (formal recognition) become urgent, near-term aims, not medium-term ones; the mission statement’s community-facing language may need to soften.
  • Community-resilience-first: Aim 5 stops being provisional and becomes central; the mission statement’s ordering should probably lead with community rather than agencies.

Next steps

This should go to the committee and membership alongside the Discussion Paper — not ahead of it. Once there’s an actual answer to Discussion §1, this page should be rewritten to match, and the result should replace the mission section on the About page rather than live here indefinitely as a separate draft.