D2.5. First Workshop Report

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

On the 15th and 27th of February 2014, COSMIC held its first regional stakeholder engagement workshops respectively in Thessaloniki, Greece and Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The workshops provided a multi-disciplinary space for stakeholders interested in the contribution of new media to crisis management activities. This was also a good opportunity to invite the members of the Advisory Board to concretely participate in the COSMIC activities. The Dutch member from Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), Arnout de Vries, attended the workshop held in Nijmegen.

At the first workshop, COSMIC presented its key findings and gave participants an opportunity to discuss these results and provide their own insights and experiences. The discussions at this workshop highlighted several key points and conclusions. Firstly, the workshop found that there is limited use and exploitation of social media from the Greek public agencies that are involved in disasters and major accidents; secondly, it found that communication among public authorities is essentially obsolete. As such, there is a need to develop a protocol, i.e., an action scenario that will be followed by the involved agencies in emergency cases. Furthermore, there is a need to raise awareness about Meteoalarm1 (a webbased service to warn people travelling in Europe of severe weather). Participants stressed the importance of social media and cross-checking information, along with increased communication among public agencies.

The second workshop focused on the identification of new media methods and techniques, as used in the Netherlands, to improve the assistance (including search and rescue) to citizens during, and immediately following a crisis. Particular attention was placed on two processes: alerting citizens and engaging citizens, for example, by the police. Secondly, it aimed to get an overview of the scientific knowledge of the effects and/or impact of these methods during crises.

The feedback has now been analysed by project partners and will be taken into consideration for the development of the guidelines for citizens, government authorities, first responders and industry for the most effective use of ICTs to aid citizen security during a crisis (WP6). In parallel, the project website is currently being redesigned in order to have a dedicated section on workshops, thereby, ensuring that all presentations from events are publicly available.

The present document reports on both national workshops for WP2, task 2.5.