Death Drill

Show and Tell Infrastructure

Give feedback to each other on where we think it might fail

• People panic because they don't realize it's a drill.
• People miss the drill notification because it gets stuck in the spam filter.
• E-mail addresses drift and the subscription doesn't get updated.

Set up your safety

Let people know a drill is going to happen.

This should be in the invitation sent to members of the mailing list. People should know when to expect the drill (i.e., the rough date).

What happens if it goes well?

Nothing should happen. Maybe a little chatter on the mailing list that should stop shortly because it's an emergencies-only list.

What happens if it fails?

The failure modes of the list should be obvious, i.e., everybody should know that something went pear-shaped. A bounce message that everybody sees (which can then be used as an alert to fix it).

The mailing list does not function at all. Nobody ever sees anything. This is really bad.

Do we want to try to do one of these at this event?