OmniAir Consortium held its first workshop on VII Tactical Deployment on May 22, 2008, at the Booz Allen Hamilton conference center in Mclean, Virginia. The workshop was a great success, with 75 participants from industry, government and academia. The day long event was characterized by robust conversation and a palpable sense of urgency that something can be done to realize DSRC. The workshop proceedings will be posted on this site shortly.

No single person, company or program will move VII forward to deployment. But through some enthusiastic and intelligent collaboration, we can make it a priority and the VII community can identify a path that makes VII an attractive and viable opportunity for government and business. Creating the blueprint for deployment with the right pull factors needed to succeed is the purpose of the VII Tactical Deployment Workshop.

The idea for VII Tactical Deployment (VTD) developed through 2007 and reflected input from the VII community and others. Most recognized a need for an alternative approach to VII deployment — one less grand in scale and cost and more incremental and financially feasible. To move the idea forward to something more substantial, OmniAir in the fall of 2007 decided to organize a workshop — an effort to gather experienced people together to collaborate and distill a VTD approach. The assumptions for the workshop are few, but are important:

• VII is something we want. We are here to design it rather than debate it; to enable the future, not predict it.
• VII is a shared endeavor — developing it should be an inclusive undertaking, not exclusive.
• VII is cooperative: technologies work most effectively when they leverage each other and interoperate.
• VII deployment, no matter the path, should lead to DSRC-based active safety-critical applications, the original vision of VII. DSRC is clearly complemented by, and complements, other protocols, but it cannot not replaced by them.

• To bring subject matter experts working parallel to but outside of the formal VII community together with VII incumbents who've shaped the program since inception.
• To allow everyone to inject their ideas and perspectives and also challenge the status quo.
• To permit the new and the existing to ally with and complement the other.
• To identify and/or define measurable, modest deployment steps, elements and requirements that support phased, tactical, deployment and that which advance the over mission of the VII program.
• To apply those elements and requirements to a group exercise to extract a technically feasible and economically-viable business approach to advance VII deployment that meets USDOT's public safety goals and industry's business objectives under the assumption that both elements must evolve hand-in-hand to realize the vision of VII.

The workshop has panels, panelists, questions, discussions and knowledge capture. The audience is mixed, with experts from inside and outside the VII community. Pundits and organizations that do not fully support the program are welcome: their viewpoints are valid and will help create more resilient VII deployment solutions.

The questions are an important element of the workshop. Some will be disseminated early so participants come prepared. Some will have no solid answer and will yield discussions which will be captured. Others are designed specifically for the "Option Finder" system and have multiple answers from which the participants will choose and/or rank.

The VTD Workshop is not a one-off. The point is to exploit the expertise in the room, leverage, capture, and use it to progress the VII program. If there is a challenge, there is a solution. What is captured will be refined and made into a set of next steps that can help us reach that solution. Their exact form is up to the group. They may be task groups, such as a team to research the design feasibility of a carry-in/aftermarket/retrofit unit, or develop a business plan for VTD deployment and identify a candidate city to test it. Another output could be a set of requirements or advice to inform future USDOT VII Program activities.

The conference facility is a unique venue well-suited for the day's objective. It has classroom style seating, exceptional AV, and features a unique "Option Finder" system very relevant to the interactive approach of the workshop:

The audience will collaborate with panelists and questions posed to both will be answered via private wireless voting devices at each participant's seat.

Votes will be tallied, captured on screen and used to inform a decision matrix.

People who: have ideas and want to share them; see a business opportunity in VTD; believe in the technology underpinning it; know that a successful nationwide deployment recognizes and leverages the forces that naturally shape the situation; and, people who are frustrated that every year 42,000 people die on our roads, more than 150,000 are seriously injured, $20 billion is wasted being stuck in traffic each year, and few ITS systems are built on standards-based technology, nor are they interoperable, and who ask, "When do we begin to make a real impact on these stubborn statistics — later?"