Observations about the social networks that allow people to connect, network and obtain news are a regular comment of mine. They continue to evolve as opportunities to connect. But what we are finding is that they are becoming an even greater tool for organizing for influence.

An estimated 1.8 million people turned out to see the presidential inauguration in person. What became readily evident was that those involved in organizing the event underestimated the numbers who would come, and as a result there were some ineffective entry point operations a significant number of high-dollar ticket holders were left holding their purple tickets. As many as 10,000 people may have been stuck for a considerable amount of time with the highly valued tickets (what I would call mosh-pit tickets due to the close proximity to the action) were stuck in the tunnel due to some less than adequate entrances (like about 36 inches wide) and some malfunctioning security equipment while other gates let them in at a faster rate.

Nearly immediately with the use of wireless technology the ticket holders began to form a group in Facebook called the “Survivors of the Purple Tunnel of Doom.” Why is this important? In only a couple of days they had 5,000 members. Also because nearly as immediately as they created the group they were able to influence people in high places and created a very public debate and resulted in the people from Capitol police to spend time through this weekend analyzing the mistakes so they could answer the issues raised by congress. You can imagine that after several months of intense planning and preparation that they would have at least had the opportunity for a break. No, they could not take a break because the scrutiny was too intense.

What began as a network to keep abreast of their classmates as people went their separate ways after college has become a significant and important tool for social activism. From this event the light bulb will go off in many people’s minds as to the value of this and many of the other internet based news mediums.

How will we adopt this medium for useful influence? Have you tested these waters yet?

The International City/County Management Association recently announced an audio conference for city and county managers called, “Asking Your Police and Fire Chief the Right Questions — to Get the Right Answers.”

The ad asked, “How many police and firefighters do you really need? How well are your public safety departments performing? Are ‘officers [firefighters] per 1,000′ and ‘number of calls’ really meaningful measures?” Government managers want to know how and why they should fund public safety the way fire chiefs want them to, so they are us to establish and use management practices that produce “meaningful” measures.

Recently Fire Chief Tom Carr of Montgomery County, Md., faced this new but relevant challenge. A new county executive and chief administrative officer changed the face of performance measures and created a county service performance system that was, in reality, the department head‘s personal performance plan.

Carr‘s management staff held several intense discussion and planning sessions to develop in just over two week what the new system identified as three to five headline, or essential, measures. These measures were chosen for their ability to reflect many of the department‘s efforts and resources and their effects. One example is the time-honored measure “percent of fires confined to the room of origin.” While this is not a new measure, it shows a number of components that affect how the service manages fire risk.

I recall first reading about this measure in the early fire service measurement manual, Procedures for Improving the Measurement of Local Fire Protection Effectiveness. This seminal work by Phil Scheanman, John R. Hall Jr. and others, published by NFPA, is as relevant today as when it was released in the mid 1970s.

Analyzing a measure such as how often we are successful at confining fire can address many dimensions of service. Consider that the following factors have an affect on an area of service depending on how it is applied. If residents fail to notify the fire department of a fire and fight it until it becomes unmanageable, the fire grows. If the 911 and dispatch function takes too long to prepare a fire call, the fire can grow. If you do not have enough fire resources or they are too far apart, response time increases and your fire can grow. If you do not have well-trained staff or have too few of them, their tactical work can be ineffective and the fire can grow. On the other hand if you have robust public education and an aggressive fire sprinkler ordinance, you may be able to reduce the risk of fire or control it before it reaches flashover. So this measure can help you see how well you are doing.

In the case of Montgomery County‘s measures, the government next implemented a program where department chiefs would need to come before the chief administrative officer and other county executive staff to discuss statistical factors of performance. This program, known as County Stat, can focus on data from the performance measures or choose key areas of problems or risk. Like New York City’s Com Stat program, the focus is on improvement and accountability. Montgomery County‘s program is billed to be less confrontational than the famous days of grilling New York‘s police commanders.

All this effort at looking at and studying how services are delivered is intended to sustain on environment of excellence and to focus on using resources in the most efficient way and applied to the most important needs. Ultimately the vision is to create a performance based budget where the chiefs would be required to offer evidence of results for how they are using funds.

Looking at recent changes to the U.K. fire service, one can see an influence of performance-based budgeting. Concerned with an increase in life and property loss from fire, the United Kingdom has committed more focused management of the risk. Consequently they have reprogrammed funding and staffing from a more reactionary operational response to one where it focuses on reducing risk through aggressive outreach education and evaluation. This could be one result of a performance and results focused approach here.

We‘ll see where this program of measurement goes but with tight economic times you can bet that executive governmental managers will continue to receive scrutiny over how resources are allocated and what results are achieved from them.

One legislative initiative to add to your priority list may be HR 4461, the Community Building Code Administration Grant Act. Talk to your representatives and educate them about this initiative if they are not already co-sponsors. If they already support the bill tell them this is important.

Your legislators should be back in their home districts soon, so they may be more accessible to you. Otherwise it‘s easy to send them an e-mail or fax or call their offices. Contact your representatives’ key staff and put this issue on their radar. Also if your community has a function where they promote important legislation as a political body, send them a note to let them know this can help them locally.

And while you‘re at it don‘t forget to promote the Federal Fire Sprinkler Incentive Act.

Here is a citing from the ICC legislative section:

Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Rep. Dennis Moore of Kansas introduced

legislation on Capitol Hill Wednesday, the Community Building Code Administration Grant Act of 2007, to provide federal grants to building departments to enhance public safety. The grant would provide $100 million per year over five years to help local governments hire, train and equip code officials, including building and fire inspectors.

If approved by Congress, the Community Building Code Administration Grant Act would support hiring and training code officials to save lives and protect property. It would aid communities that see their resources stretched when they face building booms or major rebuilds after a disaster. Studies show that every dollar invested to build stronger and safer results in savings of $4 to $7 in reduced damages when a disaster occurs.

The act was passed out of the House Financial Services Committee on June 24 with $100 million funding. CBCAG creates a grant program dedicated to local building and fire code compliance. But it still needs Senate co-sponsors.

In a recent issue of the Building Safety Journal International Code Council CEO Richard Weiland talks about the fire service’s increased participation in the building-code process. I think it‘s important to note that ICC recognizes this shift and its importance to the code industry.

“Earlier this year at the codes Forum in Rochester [New York], we saw first hand the passion and motivation of fire services members in the debate over residential sprinklers (RB114),” Weiland said. “The proposal to require fire sprinklers in one- and two- family homes and townhouses sparked a spirited discussion. Fire professionals voiced their opinion, and their opinion was heard and respected. While that opinion ultimately did not prevail, I think the day was a success for the fire services, and for ICC as a whole.”

I really think this is a respectful acknowledgement, and the fire service should follow this momentum toward greater influence in the provision of building safety.

Weiland, however, observed that the fire service has put less emphasis on loss prevention. “Too many fire departments continue to put prevention on the back burner, when in fact more lives are saved preventing fires then putting them out,” he said. I have to imagine — or would like to think — that the ICC is concerned about a waking giant.

There was really a small crowd of fire service people participating in the ICC Code Hearings, compared to what there could have been. Even though we in fact have fire and life-safety loss management as a back-burner function, the fire service could easily double or triple the numbers seen in Rochester. In fact, there were a number of fire service people who were in Rochester whose bosses directed them to not vote due to the tremendous political ramifications and controversy over residential sprinklers in their jurisdictions.

But it is ongoing, up-front participation in the code process that is important. The vote in Rochester was to overturn the International Residential Code Committee’s decision to not move sprinklers from the appendix to the code body. As usual the fire service was reacting to a challenge. It really is more effective to be involved on the front end through participation instead of trying to overturn a status quo action that requires a two-thirds majority. Firefighter safety in part depends on enforcement, engineering, education and all other means of thoughtful planning.

The fire service is represented on the ICC Board by two veterans: Vice President Adolph Zubia, fire chief in Las Cruces, N.M., and Barbara Koffron, fire marshal in Phoenix. These individuals represent the fire service’s interests well, but we need more participation.

As I previously wrote, fire chiefs should be joining the ICC as members, participating on ICC committees, and forming better productive and supportive relationships with their local building officials. These actions even meet the spirit of the 16 Firefighter Life-Safety Initiatives. Number 15 says “advocacy must be strengthened for the enforcement of codes and the installation of home fire sprinklers.” These efforts are inexpensive and easy for every chief to do can some day save a firefighter‘s life.

I have been thinking that we need to approach fire investigation and reporting more holistically, much like the National Transportation Safety Board treats a transportation wreck and like many jurisdictions reconstruct vehicle collisions. We need to address the root causes that allow deaths to occur rather than just focusing an origin and cause determination.

There are actions and omissions that enable — and keep enabling — a multiple-death fire to occur in the first place. We need to attack those root causes with all our capacity and energy. Fire chiefs can have the spotlight after a fatal fire to talk about their total disgust for the tolerance for these conditions. Publicize as unacceptable the most common root causes at the local level. Fire chiefs can present a compelling argument for additional fire and life-safety resources. But that teachable moment will evaporate nearly as quickly as the opportunity developed.

I have no doubt that most of the places where multiple-fire deaths occurred have excellent fire departments that did everything by the books when responding to the 911 call. But something happened before the fire department ever got the call, possibly before the fatal fire even began, that tipped the balance in favor of death instead of survival.

There are three essential elements of fire and life safety: education, engineering and enforcement. You can reduce risk significantly if you are approaching all three of these function areas sincerely. But most departments are not. Think about this in terms of Francis L. Brannigan‘s “Fire Slot Machine.” If you pull the one-armed bandit and get three Es, you achieve fire and life safety. If there is a lesser employment or effectiveness of any one of the three Es, then you have a range of risk from “whew, that was close” to the mayor and many of the town‘s residents attending funerals for a whole family who died in a catastrophic breakdown of the principles of protection.

Plug the root causes into a problem-solving flow chart, brainstorm all the different things that could and should be able to prevent them from occurring, and put out whatever effort it takes to eliminate it from happening. This can reduce these multiple-death fires. Shouldn‘t families be safe in their homes?

By the way, multiple deaths occur in newly constructed homes, too, despite what the National Association of Home Builders would tell customers. Recently a fire in a new home in Saint Michael, Md., killed three young people. The home was built just outside of an incorporated area that requires residential sprinklers in a single-family home. Residential sprinklers reduce the chance of flashover by wetting the walls and ceilings and most likely putting out the fire. But the life-saving technology didn‘t wet the walls in that fire because it wasn’t required.

My previous comments come from the energy of having groups of people nationally networked in an e-mail group called ePARADE. The ePARADE group is a simple Yahoo group composed of more than 400 fire marshals and fire and life-safety professionals who originally got together and identified a communication gap among fire marshals.

The ePARADE has generated advice and familiarity across the continent, identifing problems and in general enabling critical discussion in real-time among people with passion for prevention. Some of the fine writings by national fire prevention leaders such as Ozzie Mirkhah, Jim Crawford and Ed Comeau were influenced by discussions in ePARADE. Crawford initiated and works at the head of a National Strategic Prevention Alliance, which recently has been awarded a substantial FIRE Grant. Good things happen when serious people become familiar and discuss serious issues.

I think Comeau used great innovation in using a very common and free feature of Google to track and visualize the multiple death fires. Look here at the power of seeing a problem right before your eyes. Using Google’s free mapping feature may lead to the right people noticing the multiple death fires who, in turn, ask the right people what are we doing about this.

There‘s evidence that people begin to pay attention to an idea when you start to receive requests for more detailed data. The ePARADE gets passed around like a useful book or magazine does at the station. E-mails are circulated beyond the group, which I think is a good thing. I heard from a Consumer Product Safety Commission staffer who inquired if we had detail fire cause of all those multiple-fatality fires — everyone suffers a gap in information about fires in the United States. I think it would be great if we could pass around real-time data about the fire problem.

I knew as soon as Comeau mentioned that he would map the multi-death fires, that it would tell us something that is not evident on the surface when you only view (or ignore) one fire at a time. Information presented visually, if it is done well, can have a dramatically revealing quality. When I saw the map, I was taken abackr. Seeing it takes the viewer to a higher level of understanding. The next step for people who like to analyze stuff finding out about the, who, what, when, where how of fires. Now this is not a lesson on effectively presenting visual information, but if you want to pass on to your planning and analysis staff some excellent approaches to presenting effective visual information, tune them into Edward Tufte whose seminal book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, is a must-read for effective presentation.

In the case of the Multiple-Fatality Fire Map it tells you where these fires are occurring and where they aren’t occurring. As I recall, there is higher propensity for a multiple-fatality fires to occur east of the Mississippi River. There are some states and whole regions where there have been no reported multiple-fatality fires. Why were whole areas with multiple states able to do this while other single states were plagued with numerou multiple-fatality fires? What conditions are different? In terms of the Pareto Principle, what 20% root behavior cause leads to 80% of these fires? When I say root cause, that‘s either fire cause or the root cause of the circumstances that rendered the people unable to escape the fire.

Here is an opportunity for us to focus on a piece of the fire death problem and try to reduce the risk. If fire deaths stay in the 3,000 to 4,000 range for 2007, as they have been for a few years, then these multiple-death fires could be as much as 6% to 8% of the total deaths. Will all these states that have had more then four of these fires be the same next year? One state had seven multiple death fires and one had six multiple death fires. Previously I referenced the spread sheet with the list of the known multiple-death fires. A bunch of states had four and five multiple death fires. If we were to focus on reducing these states‘ statistics by 50%, this will reduce the number of deaths significantly nationally.

A recent outbreak caused approximately 198 deaths in four months. The medical examiner found pulmonary edema and damage to the trachea, bronchi and alveoli in the upper areas of the lungs. Most of the victims were children, who have been particularly vulnerable to this menace. The disease has turned up throughout the country, and the medical examiner was concerned about the root cause of the disease process. Then the weather began to warm, and the disease diminished in intensity. Yet occasional outbreaks still occur throughout the country.

Diseases emerge and go away, and while this disease killed more than 198 people, it did not reach the threshold necessary to raise public fear. In fact, this disease actually has killed an average of 4,000 per year without national concern because most of the deaths occur one or two at a time.

The disease is residential fire deaths. House fire are no longer feared by most people — in fact, many feel indifferent. People are more afraid of weapons of mass destruction than a frequent threat that can involve anyone at any time. In fact, there seems to be an unusually high number of what NFPA calls catastrophic multiple death fires this year.

Ed Comeau, a technical writer on a range of fire service subjects, started to focus attention on these fires because we have all become just a little too accepting of these deaths. He started keeping track of the multiple death fires and has made the fire events available online. It’s a pretty impressive list for only a little over six month’s data. He also identified a critical gap in available information and noted that such information could be useful to keeping the the threat of fire on everyone’s minds.

There is a saying that “what gets measured gets done.” As a result of Comeau’s life-safety activism, the U.S. Fire Administration has begun to make available daily information about fire deaths nationally. Quick Response: Fire Safety in the News monitors news media outlets to learn of residential fire fatalities nationally. The USFA’s approach is to make available for the media up-to-date information about fires and relevant fire safety information.

Fire chiefs also can play a role in reducing the acceptance of residential fire fatalities by taking tragedies to advocate more attention to the problem. Some departments will place full focus on the fire and send operational firefighters door to door with the teachable moment. If the fire chief shows leadership by expressing concern, it will likely get the attention of local media, elected officials and community leaders, which could offer unanticipated opportunities to talk more about the fire problem and the need for residential sprinklers and working smoke alarms on every level of a home. The fire chief also could benefit from this exposure by being able to talk about what their department needs more of to make the community even safer.

While the disease of fatal fires does not spread through the normal epidemic process it can be as insidious if we ignore and even tolerate it. Is it possible for acceptance of fatal fires to become like crime and blight where tolerance brings about more of the same? Look at how municipalities have dealt with graffiti and other unacceptable social conditions, immediately eliminating the evidence by repainting the surface that was vandalized. Could we do the same for fires by aggressively attacking the root causes when the fires occur?

I struggled a bit in writing this blog because I kept having mixed feelings about wanting to report the residential sprinkler initiative and promote fire chief involvement in the development of building and fire codes in the same paper. So what I allowed to happen with this writing is a mix of the two. Sometimes you cannot separate inter-related subjects as each depends on the other for background or linked information, so I’ll let you try to sort it out. In an earlier blog I wrote about the residential sprinkler initiative that was being proposed to the International Residential Code as part of the International Code Council family of codes. After witnessing a code hearing for the first time, I found it an intense but understandable process with which fire chiefs need to be actively involved. To get to a national requirement for residential sprinklers, we need to be involved in this code process.

Fire Chiefs and Code Development

I have heard frequent comments about the negative aspects of building codes that decrease mass of materials and make the firefighter’s job even more dangerous than it already is. Codes that reduce the window of time that the firefighter can either stand on or under floors that are supported by beams engineered to be just over the threshold necessary to support a designed load but that can be consumed in minutes may just put the firefighter on the scene at the worst time, just before potential collapse. There are many more examples where, for the sake of economy and efficiency, engineering has facilitated a built world that is not as forgiving to firefighters as it once had been.

So what are we going to do about it? No doubt about it, the building industry controls the building code, and maybe this is their domain and should be this way. But we have had little impact in this arena over the years and need to. Chiefs, we all need to join the International Code Council and provide staff who can be involved in committee work — at least in those areas that are critical to safety and survival of firefighters — and ultimately vote at the code hearings. Considering that we are afforded significant opportunity to positively affect the codes, the price of membership ($280 for governments representing populations greater then 150,000; there are graduated prices based on population) is not bad. This gives you voting opportunity for up to 12 staff. Click here to see ICC membership information.

The ICC is a somewhat new animal to the code world. It was formed in 2003 by combining the legacy codes we used for years, such as Building Officials and Code Administrators, the Uniform Building Code developed by the former International Conference of Building Officials, and Southern Building Code Congress International. Fire service members in some areas of the country have been working over the last couple of years to adjust the new International Building Code to accommodate their concerns.

These officials found that, after a consensus code was developed to accommodate all three legacy codes, some good features were lost from the former codes. In particular, the California Fire Chiefs Association has been very aggressive at committee and ultimately in votes at the hearings to try to make adjustments to the IBC. This past year has seen a lot of hard work by the California group and other fire service ICC members to make adjustments and hold onto some of the more restrictive language in IBC relating to height and area allowances. While this critical work was going on with height and area code language, the fire service and fire protection industry also were working to move a code requirement for residential sprinklers from the appendix to the body of the code. We need to continue this activity and increase it significantly if we are going to be able to get on equal footing with the building industry and improve fire and life safety for firefighters.

Speaking with Jim Tidwell, retired chief of the Fort Worth (Texas) Fire Department and the ICC director of fire service activities, he describes the fire service’s ability to come in at the end of the code development and revision process and still have the opportunity to make needed changes. Proposed codes do not become set until a final hearing and vote before the ICC government members. It is strictly a final vote from the government members to finalize a code change. What has been the norm is that it is mostly government building officials who are directly involved in this voting. The final process occurred the week of May 20 in Rochester, N.Y., and even though the fire service and fire protection industry (because this was an effort that involved all fire service players) were not successful, we did make a statement about being committed to having an influence on the codes.

Now is the time to apply for membership on ICC Committees. These committees are formed anew after the final hearing. One important feature of ICC Committee involvement is that committee expenses are fully covered by the ICC.

Residential Sprinklers Come Close

At the Rochester ICC code hearings, the fire service was able to vote down committee action to sustain the code and not allow the residential sprinkler requirement into the code body. (One of the core values of ICC Committees is to sustain the code’s status quo.) Once the floor had overturned the recommendation of the committee, it was then necessary to have a new recommendation to take the place of the defeated recommendation. Successful achievement of a floor amendment requires a vote of 2/3 majority (a super majority) of the floor to sustain the new recommendation. The fire service came up 80 plus votes short of the super majority. Upon failing to get the votes, the original committee action, as described in the ICC rules, stands.

So it was that close this year to the fire service obtaining a national residential sprinkler requirement. In the future we need to be proactive and drive the code process as much as possible as opposed to merely reacting. While there were some excellent amendments achieved at the code hearings, with a super-majority requirement we cannot depend on this as a strategy. The National Association of Home Builders spent over a quarter of a million dollars to fight the fire service on residential sprinklers.

We need to be involved in the code process throughout the whole cycle, which means developing and exercising more influence and participation in the committee work. You have heard that it often takes more energy to solve a problem then it took to create the problem. In the ICC process of code amendment, it takes more energy, resources, converted opposition, etc. to overturn the action of the committee than it took for the committee to take its normal action. If there are areas of building codes that we want to influence, we need to be able to have aggressive involvement throughout the process. By the way, our concern for lightweight construction could be offset by residential sprinklers, which are designed to reduce the potential for a fire reaching flashover. Maybe this is our trade-off for allowing lightweight structural materials that do not stand up well to a fire that gets into the structure.

We may never be able to convert home builders into residential sprinkler advocates, but we can educate them on every detail of how they work, what they are and what they are not. The builder associations should be hounded by us with our sales pitch. We need to get them to sit through a workshop and demo on how sprinklers work. Maybe more important then convincing the builders is to market the good sense of residential sprinklers to the government building officials who, as a group, do not understand the technology and fear that sprinklers will create nightmares for them in their work world. Like the code committees, the building officials try to achieve calm and normalcy among their customers (builders), so if we can help them do this we may be able to convince them that including sprinklers in the residential code is not going to be a bad thing. It was the government building officials who did not support our efforts in Rochester. They are a critical group.

What are the next steps in selling the need for residential sprinklers? To begin with, fire chiefs at the local level and fire protection professionals can start today by opening a dialogue with local building officials. Meet with them for the sole purpose of showing them how these systems work. Bring in groups like Fire Team USA to assist in a regional education workshop on sprinklers. Borrow or build a side-by-side sprinkler demo. There’s nothing like visualizing how well the technology works, and building a sprinkler demonstration trailer is an excellent and relevant use of a Fire Prevention and Safety Grant.

We also can try to create the next successful safety feature that people just have to have. Somewhere out there is an influential person who can turn residential sprinklers into the next vehicle airbag, child safety seat, anti-smoking or Mothers Against Drunk Driving campaign. We need to copy the model for those programs and convert our product, residential sprinklers, into something everyone must have. We were close at the hearings to obtaining requirements for residential sprinklers in the International Residential Code. We start today to make sure we have the IRC committee recommendation during the next code cycle.

There was an article in The Washington Post of significance to those of you who need to and want to influence people. The article talks about a young California woman who suffered unwanted attention after her photo was included in a sports blog. There were significant statistics in the article that we should pay attention to and are relevant to connecting us with people. The Washington Post described how, “she had more than 1,000 new messages on her My Space page. A three-minute video of [I am redacting the subject’s name because I don’t want to perpetuate her problem] standing against a wall and analyzing her performance at another meet had been posted on YouTube and viewed 150,000 times.”

This is critical stuff to the fire service. We could have people reading our recruiting message all over the world. What is of interest to the fire service is our constant need to facilitate positive attention to market ourselves, recruit the best and brightest new members, change people’s risky behavior, and compete for scarce resources. Even if we choose not to enter this venue, we need to know that other successful organizations will. This will be our benchmark. Trust me (no wait, you don’t know me that well yet, do you?). Even though the environment is changing, the mechanics of connecting has not changed much. What has changed is the speed by which it operates. The Washington Post article reinforced the power I had begun to notice about networking electronically. This power can be negative as described above or unbelievably positive.

While there is some luck (Denis Waitley considers luck an acronym meaning “laboring under correct knowledge”) to getting influential information to target recipients, there is a growing body of information about how information, fads, fame and notoriety can spread like a virus. In the best-selling book The Tipping Point, author and researcher Malcom Gladwell describes how concepts and ideas can go from obscurity to all the rage. It’s mostly due to factors that are as common in spreading an idea as a sneeze and contaminated hands are to spreading disease. One critical component of this process is a key person called a connector who generally makes a great effort to know many people from diverse backgrounds, careers and interests. Connectors are either sought out to spread the word about something, or they have a natural process for this as they communicate within a network of peers and friends. They also generally carry established legitimacy, which makes any message more readily received and forwarded.

Consider the number of legislative bills passed in the last two years related to flammability standards for cigarettes. One critical element is people who can connect the issue to people who vote, both on the assembly floor and for the legislators. Those people contacted by the connector, if convinced of the legitimacy of the issue to be supported, then will flood the legislators with e-mail and faxes to state their support. Those people who send the faxes and e-mails often will be connectors themselves and will send the message to their sphere of influence. Before you know it, the support increases exponentially in relation to the effectiveness of each connector’s sphere of influence. Elected officials monitor their mail like a cardiac monitor in the cardiac-care unit. The electronic communication process makes it easier because it takes little more than pressing “send.”

If a connector becomes aware of important information that can help someone else or just wants to recommend a consistently good restaurant, he or she generally tells someone about it, usually within a familiar and well-established network. Two important fire service connectors are Chief Ronny J. Coleman and Chief Billy Goldfeder. These two connected people have built long-term relationships and contacts as they went about doing their jobs, delivering speeches, teaching, writing in national journals and, in general, connecting.

Chief Coleman has a very powerful and long-term profile of connectedness. His is one of more traditional routes that took many years to establish and — key to connectors — continues to grow. He will cross paths with his connections time and time again. My first exposure to him came when I used his book as a college text in my “Strategy and Tactics” class at Montgomery Community College. In 1984 I attended the ISFSI Company Officer Development I course in Framingham, Mass., where Ron presented several subjects and was the first fire service person I had heard to talk about the benefits of reading both Fortune and Ms. magazines to broaden your sphere of knowledge and awareness. I have also had monthly doses of topical interest from Coleman’s “Chief’s Clipboard” column.

While I have had many other direct and indirect contacts with Chief Coleman (and remain possibly an unidentified connection to him), these connections with me and thousands of other people are important to his sphere of influence. Just last week I had the opportunity to talk to him directly at the International Code Council Hearings in Rochester, N.Y. Ronny testified on behalf of the fire service and the fire protection industry in favor of an effort to include a requirement for residential sprinklers in the International Building Code for residential structures.

In 23 years I have had an unusual number of contacts with Chief Colemen. Many of you probably have as well and also will have had similar experiences with other connectors, such as Dennis Compton, Meri-K Appy, R. Wayne Powell and Billy Goldfeder. If you visually mapped out all these people and their interactions with you, there would be a very interesting web of interconnections and influence between them all.

Billy Goldfeder has built a base of connectiveness not unlike Coleman’s. The difference is Billy’s targeted use of electronic media to deliver information. He has used an Web site and e-newsletters to build a widely seen, effectively delivered, and highly relevant and repeated message about firefighter safety and survival. Possibly with all the other attention being paid to firefighter safety and survival, such as “Everyone Goes Home” and the National Firefighter Near-Miss Reporting System, the context for the ongoing message was ideal for an information epidemic, and word spread in an extraordinarily short period of time.

My first contact with Billy was around 1989 when he was director of a fire and rescue service in my region. Billy had done some work and research into increasing assignment, recruitment and retention of volunteers. At the time my department was researching ways to better facilitate and assign human resources, and we were looking at how we could schedule volunteers to fill staffing gaps. I talked to Billy at that time, but I hadn’t heard much about him until 2005 when I heard about his extraordinary presentations on firefighter safety and survival. That same year Billy was awarded a “President’s Award” from then-IAFC President Robert DiPoli for his safety work.

Around the same time, Billy was getting his now incredible FirefighterCloseCalls.Com established online. Billy’s experience is the positive counterpart to the negative story mentioned earlier. He is a prime example of how connecting helps to spread ideas and influence. I recently asked Billy about how many people he has on his lists. The list of formal subscribers to his electronic newsletter “The Secret List” is one known layer of a huge network. Beyond the formal layer of subscribers is a downstream information system where the list is handed off to an extraordinary informal network that is hard to conceive. Here are recent statistics related to Chief Goldfeder’s site and e-new letter: “The Secret List goes direct to 80,000+ via our server … and gets forwarded to many, many more. The Web site gets 250,000+/- (average) unique hits monthly and 4 million hits monthly.” How about that for circulation?

None of us need to perform to the same remarkable degree as some of the people discussed here, but I hope you will see how strategic connectiveness begins to produce positive influence. Getting your message to stick is a subject I’ll look at in the future.

The U.S. Fire Administration has “advocacy” as one of the key words in its description. A search for the word “advocacy” on the USFA Web site yields 82 hits, indicating that advocacy is a core principle within the USFA’s mission. The word advocacy means active support, and The Free Dictionary.com defines advocacy as “The act of pleading or arguing in favor of something, such as a cause, idea, or policy; active support.” As a function of defeating the U.S. fire problem when there were over 5,000 civilian and close to 200 firefighter deaths per year, it was determined that a strong central advocate was needed to reduce the risk against fire.

So advocacy is a good thing, right? Well, maybe not. As USFA staff were getting ready for the Prevention Advocacy and Resource and Data Exchange Conference, which was held May 17–19 at the National Fire Academy, an unnamed federal manager suggested or otherwise directed that advocacy be removed from PARADE or changed to some other “A” word. But how can you advocate to reduce the national fire problem if the organization created to be an advocate can’t accept the appropriateness of the word advocate in the title of one of its key programs? We certainly haven’t declared “Mission Accomplished” yet.

In 2003 a group of fire and life safety professionals gathered at the NFA to begin planning and organizing the first PARADE conference. It was this group of some of the nation’s leading fire marshals and members of the International Association of Fire Chiefs Fire and Life Safety Section, the International Fire Marshals Association and the National Association of State Fire Marshals who decided that advocacy needed to be a key word in the name of the prevention group. Even if the name included only the first two words, prevention and advocacy, the word advocacy was a logical choice because it embodied the mission and function of the USFA.

So what is behind the urgency to drop advocacy as a USFA attribute? More to come on this story, but in the mean time maybe you can suggest an appropriate word that means active support. “Prevention Accomplished”? No!