On June 10, 2010, the FCC and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) held a joint workshop on 21st Century emergency alerting. Kelly Williams, senior director for Engineering and Technology Policy, participated on behalf of NAB. Discussions focused on improving the consistency and clarity of alerting systems and procedures, including terminology that would reduce the risk of confusion during a national emergency.

Participants also emphasized a need for more EAS training for alerting originators, such as local emergency personnel and state governor designees, and better standard operating procedures for EAS initiators. Williams encouraged the FCC to extend the existing 180-day deadline for EAS participants to accept common alerting protocol (CAP) -based messages following the adoption of CAP standards by FEMA. FEMA stated its intention to conduct annual national testing of the EAS, as a way of isolating and correcting potential problems. Overall, the workshop successfully identified several areas of agreement among the public and private sector, as well as next steps towards the implementation of next-generation EAS.