Episode 236: CIVTAK 2024 & the Role of TAK in Public Safety with Ken Rehbehn

Episode notes

What is CIVTAK 2024 and why should you go?

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy!

In this episode:

What is the Team Awareness Kit (TAK) ?

How to adopt TAK for civilian use cases

What is CIVTAK 2024 ?

Learn from Ken Rehbehn - the Principal Analyst at Critical Communications Insights LLC.

Ken is a data communications expert and industry analyst who is also a volunteer firefighter. He has been tracking the evolution of technology in public safety, particularly in the area of mission-critical communications and situational awareness tools like the Team Awareness Kit (TAK) .

TAK is a common operating picture platform that delivers geospatially linked information to field users, allowing for collaboration and data interoperability. It is non-proprietary, open source, and can adapt to different communications capabilities.

Ken is spearheading the CIVTAK 2024 conference , which aims to bring together agencies and innovators to share success stories and drive the adoption of TAK in civilian use cases.

The CIVTAK 2024 conference is on October 1 - October 3, 2024, at the Hilton Washington Dulles Hotel. Click here to register!

And take a listen to hear what he has to share!

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources!

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Chapters

1. 0:00 Kevin's intro: Ken Rehbehn, TAK and CivTAK 2024
2. 1:11 Ken joins
3. 2:05 Ken's background
4. 7:19 Why responders need a communications 101
5. 8:02 What TAK is
6. 16:16 Shared consciousness and a common picture
7. 20:14 Building the CivTAK community
8. 21:30 What the CivTAK 2024 forum will offer
9. 24:44 Why CivTAK will save lives
10. 25:14 Wrap
11. 25:28 Outro

Questions answered in this episode

What is TAK and how does it help first responders?

Ken Rehbehn describes TAK as a common operating picture ensemble of software that delivers geospatially linked information to field users. It provides data interoperability between applications in a non-proprietary, open source way, and it has a consistent user interface across ATAK for Android, iTAK for iOS, WinTAK for Windows, and WebTAK for web consoles.

Hear it at 8:33

What public safety use cases does TAK support beyond wildland firefighting?

Ken Rehbehn mentions big sporting events, the Olympics, ski slopes for avalanche mitigation planning, parades, 4th of July celebrations on the National Mall, and Presidential Inaugurations as examples. He also describes water rescue operations on the Potomac River where multiple agencies respond every weekend and could benefit from a shared operating picture.

Hear it at 8:33

What are the three key aspects that make TAK well suited for public safety collaboration?

Ken Rehbehn identifies data interoperability between applications in a non-proprietary way, a level set user interface that is extensible and secure, and communications agility that works from zero communications up to gigabit transmission capabilities.

Hear it at 8:33

What is CivTAK 2024 and when does it take place?

CivTAK 2024 is a three-day conference hosted October 1st to 3rd at the Hilton Washington Dulles Hotel. Ken Rehbehn says it will serve as a gathering place for people to share success stories, learn from challenges, and hear from agencies and innovators using TAK, with sessions ranging from introductory to advanced topics like scaling TAK servers.

Hear it at 21:30

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 236 transcript

CIVTAK 2024 & the Role of TAK in Public Safety with Ken Rehbehn

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Ken Rehbehn

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Welcome to the Smart Firefighting podcast. Kevin Sofen here, where we cover all things related to the future of smart technology for first responders around the world. Please enjoy the show and let me know what you want to learn about next. Ken Rehbehn is a data communications expert in industry analysis, who's also a previous volunteer firefighter. He's been tracking the evolution of technology and public safety, particularly in the area of mission-critical communications and situational awareness tools like the Team Awareness Kit, TAK is a common operating picture and platform that delivers geospatially linked information to field users, allowing for collaboration and data interoperability. It is non-proprietary, open source, and can adapt to different communication system capabilities. Ken is also spearheading the CivTAK 2024 Conference, hosted October 1st to 3rd at the Hilton Washington Inn Dulles Hotel. This conference aims to deliver and bring together agencies and innovators to share success stories and drive the adoption of TAK and public safety civilian use cases. Take care, hope to see you all there. Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Smart Firefighting podcast. Very grateful to be sitting virtually alongside a very near friend and mentor and just all around awesome guy, Ken Rehbehn. Ken, welcome to the pod. How are you doing today?

[1:27] Ken Rehbehn: Kevin, it's just great to be here. It's a beautiful day right now. It's almost like a spring day, even though it's June in the Washington DC area. So it's great to be with you.

[1:35] Kevin Sofen: Absolutely. Well, it's like officially summertime Chicago. I mean, people are outside, it's sunny, it's sun's out. People are playing out with the pigs game with their shirts off. It's just summertime shy is the best.

[1:46] Ken Rehbehn: Awesome.

[1:46] Kevin Sofen: Yeah. So I've had the fortune of getting to know you and spending some time with you. But for those of us that aren't as fortunate or have been living under a rock, Give us a little bit of the, who is Ken Rehbehn? A little bit of the back story in terms of how you got here today, and then we're going to dive into all things TAK and CivTAK, a little bit after that.

[2:05] Ken Rehbehn: Yeah, I think today we'll find out that Ken Rehbehn is schizophrenic, kind of a sad story. One half of his life professionally has been in data communications. Starting with X25, which is very old data transfer approach to today, with mobile broadband, LTE 5G. Around 2002, I became an industry analyst, taking my expertise with data communications and the mobile cellular infrastructure and applying it to commentary about technology evolution, the companies that are competing out in the marketplace. Fast forward to today, and I've tried to end my schizophrenia because throughout that My whole time in industry, I was engaged as a firefighter, as a volunteer firefighter in the Washington, D.C. area. Coming out of university, I was a firefighter paramedic and I had to make a decision, do I go into the career service with Montgomery County Fire Rescue, the District of Columbia Fire Department, many of my friends were, and I have an addiction to travel. And so I went into industry working on something that I love, which is the transmission of communications and ultimately in the wireless space. So more recently I've focused my attention on technology evolution to the technology that supports communications for public safety. So mission critical communications, as well as a small set of important situational awareness information tools. In particular, firefighter tracking in GPS deprived environments. Thinking back to the Wooster catastrophe in Massachusetts where we lost so many firefighters because of an inability to understand where were these people in a large structure. Reach them in time to extract them at a time of trouble. I've been tracking the evolution of that technology, as well as command and control mechanisms. What kind of tools can we provide the fire service leadership to ensure that personnel accountability on scene is robust? When air supplies run low or pass alarms start sounding, how do we capture that state? I remain interested in mobile, LTE and 5G, actually 6G as it starts coming on the horizon. So I stay actively engaged with the suppliers of those solutions out in the marketplace. Now as a result of watching all of this, the communications technology evolving, the situational awareness tools improving steadily over time, I became aware, I guess back in 2021, of increasing use of mesh radio communications. Stumbled into this at FireRescue International and I asked the vendor, why? Because I'm a licensed spectrum bigot. I think that public safety communications should be on licensed spectrum that we can trust and not the unlicensed Wi-Fi type of spectrum. So I was taken a bit aback when the vendor is pointing to mesh communications using Wi-Fi as a way to communicate with end user devices. And what was explained to me that wilderness firefighting was evolving and a use case of This was situational awareness information, getting it into the hands of the hotshot crews in a timely fashion. As I think a lot of folks on this podcast know, the Dingle Act came into existence after the Parnell hotshot catastrophe. And that apparatus of how do we get data effectively to these remote areas requires ingenuity on the communications angle, that's where we get mesh, ingenuity in terms of presentation of information. And that's where I first start seeing TAK, the team awareness kit, delivering value. Well, in the years since 2021, I'm just gobsmacked at how this has accelerated, expanded. It has become much more sophisticated than what we had in the early days. And so I've been increasingly spending more and more time looking at TAK and trying to find ways to help expand the adoption of TAK in the public safety as well as non-public safety arenas in the United States, as well as Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand. I'm seeing in public safety operations in all of these places, interest and need for this kind of capability.

[7:19] Kevin Sofen: Yeah. Well, Ken, one thing that we need to do, and maybe on a separate podcast, is we need like a communications 101 for dummies of what is mesh? What is Wi-Fi? What is 5G? What is LTE? I feel like a lot of those terms are thrown around and people maybe kind of assume that they understand those. So, do you have something like that yet? Because if not, we should-

[7:38] Ken Rehbehn: I think it would be a great conversation. And I think it's an important topic for folks who are operational. We have land mobile radio for push to talk. We have LTE systems. We have these mesh systems. We have Starlink. There are profound changes in play now that will affect our end users that are in the public safety agencies. I think, Kevin, I think we got a lot to talk about over the years.

[8:02] Kevin Sofen: Yeah. That's to say the least. One of the words that is very much trending across all of public safety, and particularly within the fire service, within the wildland space, and law enforcement, and you're seeing this transfer from the DOD Air Force to public safety is TAK, Tactical Assault Kit, Tactical Awareness Kit. And then there's a whole other nuance of ATAK, iTAK, WinTAK, CivTAK, all these something TAK. But in your words, I would love to know, what is TAK?

[8:33] Ken Rehbehn: So I see TAK as a common operating picture ensemble of software capabilities that serve as a unifying platform for delivering geospatially linked information into the hands of the users that are deployed out in the field, especially when they are operating as parts of dispersed teams. So this dispersed team may be supporting an operation such as a wildland fire. I think that's self-evident. You have teams that are fanning out across mountains, but there are a surprising number of use cases that go far beyond these wildland operations. For example, the big sporting events that we have coming into North America, as well as I'm heading over in July to the Olympics to provide radio support at the venues. These are operations that take place across campuses, include multiple venues. Another example is parks. I was pleasantly surprised at IWCE in March to run into someone in Canada who uses tack at a ski slope to plan for avalanche mitigation. send teams up with explosives, which sounds like a cool part-time job, and they blow up snow. Well, planning that and safely executing that is all based on attack, giving those folks who are out in the field the information they need when they need it, where they need it. Other examples are parades. Here in the Washington area, we've got the 4th of July celebrations on the mall. Every couple of years, we have this thing called a Presidential Inauguration, which is an enormous multi-agency, multi-state, multi-party endeavor that we all come together and collaborate, and it's not in one place. We're spread across the National Mall. So lots of use cases for Team Awareness Kit, but it has some characteristics that I think are really important to remember. One is that it provides data interoperability between applications in a way that I don't really believe we've seen before. It's non-proprietary because this has come out of the Department of Defense efforts. It's open source and it's actively supported. I think of TAK, that the mechanism that TAK uses to move data across the network between applications is being very similar to our railroads with a standard gauge for track. We can all use this conduit as a result. In contrast, proprietary approaches generally take care to seal off the access to the data. They put barriers in, TAK removes barriers for collaboration. Another characteristic of TAK that I think is important in addition to data interoperability is it is a level set for the user interface. We get with TAK in its various forms. So ATAK with Android, iTAK for iOS devices, WinTAK for Windows-based systems, WebTAK for web console access, what we end up with is a common interface for geospatially relevant information. And it simplifies the addition of innovation that is behind the curtains, because this user interface is extensible and it's secure. So it allows companies that have some amazing new ideas about how to bring important situational information to the eyes of the field users, as well as the control rooms, to bring that innovation through a conduit that is standardized and consistent across the field. This is really important. If you have an end user agency and they have to go out and deploy in the end user's devices multiple applications that each take a slightly different bit of information to convey it to the end user, now you're putting someone who's in the field with a demanding task, cognitive load and friction because they have to keep swapping from application to application to get to what they need. With TAK, if it's geospatially linked and you have a dot on a map, you can interrogate that dot. And through that dot, you expose a magic portal to information that an innovator has made possible. An example that would be a drone feed. We've got great drone companies out there that are finding ways to convey that video from the drone, along with supplementary information, computer aided dispatch information, sensor information from IoT, it goes on and on and on. There's a massive amount of innovation that can now be exposed through a portal that is consistent, we can train people, we can scale it more readily. Now there's a third aspect of TAK that I find very important. So we've talked about data interoperability. We've talked about the UI level set. We get a common platform to present all of this innovation that companies are out there performing. The third aspect is communications agility. You were talking earlier about we should really do a whole talk about the different types of communications media that are out there. TAK is thoughtfully designed to go from zero communications to gigabit transmission capabilities and everything in between, leaving it to the end user or agencies to determine and deploy the capabilities of TAK aligned to the communications capabilities they have in hand. There's no assumption that we're going to have a particular type of channel available. So if you have no communications, TAK is designed so that you can load up in the end user's device a package with everything they need, plus they can communicate locally with multicast on an Android device. But if you have gigabit transmission capabilities, well, now you can start transferring video, You can consume video, much more capabilities. So I think those three elements of TAK make it very well suited for agencies that are collaborating internally with their teams, externally with partner organizations. And it reduces barriers, ultimately.

[16:16] Kevin Sofen: Love it, Ken. A couple of words you said that I really like are consistent, unifying portal, collaboration. And one that I've heard, I think Ryan McLean had mentioned it, was Alex Gorsek, the term shared consciousness. Yeah. And it's that idea of just-

[16:30] Ken Rehbehn: Great way to put it.

[16:32] Kevin Sofen: You see what I'm seeing, I see what you're seeing, whether you're Firelaw, EMS, DOD, we can all kind of be seeing and tracking the same thing built on a non-proprietary software with the ability to have this open source plug-in ecosystem.

[16:45] Ken Rehbehn: And what excites me is that this opens it up, not just to the members of my agency, at my partner agencies, and it's very straightforward to change the mix of partners that I'm gauging with. What I hope, and this hope really stimulated my desire to get a conference going on civilian use of tack. In the Washington DC area near where I live, every single weekend, we have people that get into distress on the Potomac River. Our response to the 911 call is significant. We send our resources from Montgomery County. We send fire rescue resources from Fairfax County. We automatically request the US Park Police helicopter, the Eagle, to respond. On the Potomac River, it's National Park Service territory, so we have park rangers that are onsite, and the entire operation is being managed by one of our battalion chiefs in the parking lot of the park area, relying on voice communications to understand where the crews, the boats are, where the foot crews are, if they're going along the trail system to find an injured hiker. We have no way today of sharing video from the Park Police Eagle. I see TAK as the unifying common operating picture for those operations and we will use it every single weekend once we have it working. The challenge is this is not a trivial thing to do. TAK is magical in the sense that I can stand up a TAK server myself. I can pull it off the net. I can start running it. I can put it on devices. If it's a small team and I've got somebody with creative IT, information technology, Unix chops, we can make this happen. There are great videos out there, I think AJ has done a lot, Greg have put out great videos that you can follow. But to scale this for 24-7, 365 days a year reliability, life and death, there needs to be a much more careful approach to making it operational. I believe that the conference that we are moving forward will help agencies understand how to go about embracing that change, who the experts are that can help them through that journey. We'll be able to hear the success stories from around the nation, and there are massive success stories. Your podcast earlier with Colorado Center of Excellence for Aerial Firefighting is one of the most significant. Texas, Department of Public Safety, what that crew has done with TAK to drive it to scale, make it easy for the end user agencies to take advantage of the power. These are important lessons that we need to get out there. And I'm looking forward in September to welcoming folks to the Washington, D.C. area to meet some of these people, to hear about these success stories, contemplate the challenges and find ways to drive the barriers down.

[20:14] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, like Ken well said, and my happy, exciting role in this piece of puzzle is frankly just to be a connector, facilitator, casting a spotlight on a lot of these exciting people. ever since they joined the Slack, the Slack tech channel, it's, I mean, there's 500-plus users in there that are all extremely passionate, extremely active. And I guess you look at all these rock stars that are in there and are thinking, man, we need to, we need to continue to share these ideas, cast a spotlight on these best practices and continue to share how other departments can learn and copy from other groups. So we're launching this roundtable series, we have our first one June 21st, we've got Paul Clifton, Greg Albrecht, and A.J. Johansson. It's going to be great. We're kind of diving into YTAC. We were touching a little bit into this TAK plug-in ecosystem, and there's just so much that it's impossible to do in one podcast, impossible to do in one roundtable, which is hence part of the why it's a great reason to bring all of our best friends and a bunch of nerds together at the CivTAK conference, which you are spearheading this year. So you kind of alluded to a little bit, but CivTAK 2024. Why is it something to be tracking? Fill me in on who, what, when, where, why, how, CivTAK.

[21:30] Ken Rehbehn: Yeah, it's going to be a three-day forum to serve as a gathering place for the people who've been there done that, as well as folks that are in agencies that are considering adding this to the toolkit. It's a meeting of minds around Team Awareness Kit so we can share success, learn from the challenges of others. We'll be doing this in the Washington Dulles area, the Hilton. We've got lots of space, plenty of meeting rooms for general meetings as well as breakouts. We'll have an exhibition, so we'll be bringing in the innovators that are bringing solutions for communications, for training, services, tax services, devices, interesting plugins. I think this will be a fun and educational way to really wrap your arms around the potential of TAK.

[22:29] Kevin Sofen: And I can tell you what, I sure am excited to be out there myself and kind of building some of the momentum here virtually, but kind of when thinking about, you just alluded to some of kind of what to expect there. What should people, kind of to double click down a bit more, what should people expect as far as the content and kind of when you arrive there, what are you going to do? I know we were talking about how we don't want to just be a bunch of PowerPoints with people talking in front of other people and really trying to make this engaging two-way. Dive into a little bit about some of the actual structure of the content and sort of what people should expect in their time in DC in later September.

[23:06] Ken Rehbehn: We'll have sessions for people who know nothing about TAK. We'll have advanced sessions that will dive into those issues, challenges around scaling TAK. So how do you structure a TAK server? How do you stand up a TAK server? How do you deal with certificates? How do you deal with user administration? Some of the interesting approaches that have been taken and varying approaches that have been taken around the country for addressing those issues. We'll provide the exhibition opportunities so people can see demonstrations of the great solutions that are out there. We'll have panel discussions from different suppliers of the innovation, the agencies that are taking advantage of TAK, hear the lessons that have been learned, and provide some opportunities for people just to network.

[23:55] Kevin Sofen: Yep. And at the end of the day, a lot of times people just want to be able to have the opportunity to connect. if you are interested in connecting with like minds that are innovating in public safety and dabbling in all things communications intact. This is the event to be at. I sure am excited to help with this as well as the roundtables leading up to some live podcasting at the event. So I'm really looking forward to that, Ken, and it's gonna be here before we know it. I know we're in the weeds right now just doing it. And I'm gonna see you in a few weeks here at the Five by Five in Chicago. So yeah, I guess, I mean, again, we've got about 10 more podcasts at Craig's, me and you, But to round us out here, any other final comments or important notes or things that we should consider leading into the summer, early fall, with all things CivTAK?

[24:44] Ken Rehbehn: Yeah, I'm convinced that CivTAK will save lives. And it will ease the pain for people that, as citizens, have been harmed by disaster. This conference, the CivTAK 24 conference, is bringing together a caring, can-do community that can leverage this tool to do a more effective job going forward. So I'm looking forward to seeing everybody in September.

[25:14] Kevin Sofen: Ken, me as well. Thank you for leading the charge and being the catalyst and the tip of the spear with all this. And we're all rooting for you, rooting for CivTAK, and man, it's going to work and it's going to be awesome. So thanks for everything that you're doing.

[25:27] Ken Rehbehn: Kevin, of course.

[25:28] Kevin Sofen: Thanks for listening to today's episode. What did you think? What did you learn? Hopefully something, right? Please reach out on social media with your thoughts on this episode and any other suggestions for future content. We look forward to capturing more important stories across public safety and are here at your service.