The “International Workshop on Innovation for Crisis Management” (I4CM), held on December 8 and 9, 2015, was an important part of DRIVER (Driving Innovation in Crisis Management for European Resilience), the largest EU-funded research project on crisis management.
DRIVER aims to strengthen social resilience in Europe. It wants to create a harmonizing culture of innovation within European crisis management, enabling theorists and practitioners to learn from each other and establish best practices. Workshops like I4CM are important in generating solutions for civil protection. The conference was opened by Professor Dr. Albrecht Broemme, president of the German Agency for Technical Relief (THW), and Professor Dr. Alfred Gossner, member of the Fraunhofer Society's board of directors.
In his opening remarks, Professor Gossner spoke about the significance of antifragile systems which work especially well when under pressure. It would be important to design systems for crisis management in an antifragile way whenever possible or useful, he said. Albrecht Broemme spoke of the difficulties when involving spontaneous volunteers in disaster relief. He said social media plays a role: “When establishing situational awareness, why not also rely on images uploaded to social media?” However, Professor Broemme said it would be important to be able to reliably establish the location and time for an image.
Experts and organizations from all over Europe participated in the event which allowed an exchange between emergency response actors and the academic crisis management community. There was general agreement in the presentations, panel discussions, networking sessions and at the evening reception that such opportunities for interaction are far too rare and low-key.
In almost all workshops sessions, the debate revolved around the possible sharing of situational awareness. This could facilitate access to verified information - for instance, as part of refugee relief. However, various countries' differences in interest and legal considerations continue to pose challenges that have to be addressed.
Dr. Wolf Engelbach, Department Head at the Fraunhofer IAO who is leading Sub-Project three, “Civil Society Resilience”, pointed out that a long-term approach was needed to improve the resilience and adaptability of individuals, groups and local communities: “Strengthening social resilience is a long process and cannot be achieved at a single workshop or in just one place. For instance, in order to determine whether an emergency responder training scheme that works well in Scotland is also suitable for Denmark or Israel, it is not enough to merely evaluate individual training courses. They also actually have to make a difference.” One key goal of DRIVER is to develop and test appropriate evaluation procedures for innovative solutions in crisis management. In the I4CM session on “improving civil society resilience” attended by about 35 participants, this was discussed in great depth.
