Policy makers, End-Users, Standardisation Organisations, and stakeholders from industry and research were brought together in Berlin on 22nd March 2018 for the ResiStand final conference. The conference on “A New Platform for Boosting Disaster Resilience through Standardisation” provided participants with the opportunity to learn more about ResiStand’s approach and the resulting outputs and findings. Seventy participants from 15 countries participated in the conference, which included keynote speeches, presentations, panel discussions, audience interaction, and networking opportunities.
The conference kicked off with welcome presentations from two of ResiStand’s partners representing standardisation bodies - Merel Haverhals, NEN and Dr. Stefan Weisgerber, DIN. Project coordinator, Pertti Woitsch from Geowise then introduced the ResiStand project to the audience outlining the challenges related to disaster resilience and the standardisation landscape, ResiStand’s stakeholder communities and the constraints to their participation in standardisation activities, and the objectives and results of the ResiStand project.
The introductory presentations were followed by keynote speeches from Dr. Aikaterini Poustourli, EC DG Home and Patricia Compard, CEN/TC 391 Chair. In her keynote speech, Dr Poustourli presented on “Security-related standardisation: supporting research and governance needs”, providing information on; the Secure Societies Work Programme 2018-2020, ResiStand and related EC funded projects, the challenges in standardisation governance, and on the forthcoming Community of Users meetings in 2018. In the second keynote speech, Patricia Compard discussed the need for standardisation in terms of interoperability, conformity assessment, shared solutions, and building user and stakeholder trust. Standardisation was discussed as a bottom up activity that needs to come from the people that use the standards. However, a number of challenges were also highlighted in terms of the lack of funding and experts, and language issues.
The majority of the conference focused on the two main outputs of the ResiStand project – the ResiStand Process and the ResiStand Roadmap. The ResiStand Process, including information on the ResiStand Asssessment Framework (RAF) and implementation was presented by Vanessa Pfau, EU-VRi, Marcel van der Lee, TNO, and Pertti Woitsch, Geowise. The presentation, available here, covered the ResiStand Pre-Standardisation Process for assessing new standardisation initiatives in order to transform them into practical solutions as formal standards. The ResiStand Assessment Framework Tool is a key part of the ResiStand Process, enabling users to assess potential standardisation items in terms of urgency, impact and feasibility. A panel discussion, moderated by Hans-Martin Pastuszka from Fraunhofer INT, followed the presentation and involved representatives from the European Commisson, CEN, industry, research, and the end-user community discussing the usefulness and governance of the ResiStand Process. Christopher Liedtke, DIN presented the ResiStand Dynamic Roadmap to participants, covering the Roadmap’s objectives, methodology, and results. The presentation on the ResiStand Dynamic Roadmap is available here.
Throughout the conference, participants also had the opportunity to network and make new contacts, and to ask questions and respond to polls through the interactive audience participation tool Sli.do. In total, 22 questions and comments were made via Sli.do, enabling the ResiStand consortium to directly address the interests and questions of the conference participants. The feedback gathered through Sli.do also highlights the value of ResiStand’s results with 88% of the Sli.do users indicating that they view the ResiStand Pre-Standardisation Process as very useful or useful.
‘Even though we have been regularly in touch with our stakeholder communities through newsletters and online surveys, actual face-to-face meetings like the Berlin conference are very valuable occasions for personal dialogue between the consortium partners and the stakeholders. We were very satisfied with the lively discussions and ample feedback we received during the event. The objectives we had set for the conference were positively achieved’, said Pertti Woitsch, the coordinator of the ResiStand project.
To download all the conference presentations, please click here.
To join a stakeholder community, please click here.
