PoS/TGT News

With DRIVER+ Project ending in August 2020, the PoS/TGT site has been transferred to AIT servers and endorsed by Disaster Competence Network Austria (DCNA). In the meantime, Horizon 2020 projects STAMINA and TeamAware have started actively using the site.  Based on the needs of these stakeholders, an alternative entry point into PoS/TGT has been established from DCNA web site. Recently, we have also started implementing new PoS/TGT features.

First visible change concerns “Crisis Management Gaps”

In initial implementation, CM Gaps were hazard specific, in order to narrow down the “possible solutions for this gap” that are automatically discovered by the site. While developing a set of STAMINA gaps, we realised that many of the CM gaps of interest for this project have already been defined in other contexts. For example:

• Rapid identification of hazardous agents and contaminants (IFAFRI)

This IFAFRI gap was initially defined in the context of forest fires, but essentially the same gap has been also identified in the context of pandemics by STAMINA project.

Rather than duplicating the gap every time a new stakeholder recognises its importance, we decided to rewrite the gap/solution matching logic so that users can easily choose the hazards they are interested in. The result is shown below, with Pandemics/Epidemics already selected.

This change has made it possible for STAMINA project to “endorse” several existing strategic CM gaps, rather than producing another set of almost identical gaps. As a welcome side effect, this has allowed us to avoid the "Gap inflation", which makes it easier for the site users to identify the gaps they are interested in.

For a good measure, the gaps endorsed by an organisation are automatically shown on its landing page, along with its solutions and team members. Some examples: STAMINA, IFAFRI, DRIVER. In this way, it is very easy to understand which gaps an organisation is interested in and to discover the solutions that could be addressing these gaps.

Dear PoS/TGT users,

This edition of the PoS/TGT newsletter brings two offers that require your immediate attention.

1. DRIVER+/CMINE Innovative Solutions Contest: public voting

The “Call for Entries” for the DRIVER+/CMINE Innovative Solutions Contest is closed and we are entering the next phase: assessing the innovation potential of the entries. You can impact the selection process by providing your own evaluations of the solutions against 3 key criteria, namely:

1. Contribution to crisis management/disaster

   Ebakindluse mõju eesmärkidele.

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   reduction (CM/DDR);
2. Affordability; and
3. Contribution to innovation.

To vote, please login or register at CMINE, www.cmine.eu, and follow the instructions.

Your vote is important to us and will have a direct impact on defining who the winners are. The providers of the Top 3 Innovative Solutions 2020 will be granted an exhibition booth at the DRIVER+ Advanced Crisis Management Conference on 19-20 February in Brussels and will present their solutions at the conference.

Voting will close on 28th of January at midnight.

2. ​Limited time free offer: professional translation of your trials and solutions.

As part of the DRIVER+ project, all contents of the PoS site are to be translated into German, French, Dutch, Polish and Italian to improve the impact throughout Europe. The translation will be carried out by professionals at the expense of the project.

The free translations can only be guaranteed for the solutions that have been published by 24.1.2020 so please do the final quality check of your solution(s) and publish the ones that are still in the “draft” mode but ready for publication. We will probably manage to add some translations 

Dear solution provider,

the DRIVER+ team is glad to inform you that the Portfolio of Solutions offers you another functionality for free. As part of the DRIVER+ project, all contents of the PoS site are to be translated into German, French, Dutch, Polish and Italian to improve the impact throughout Europe. The translation will be carried out by professionals at the expense of the project. During a quality check we noticed that unfortunately the use cases are still missing in your solution description. To be able to do the free translation, your solution has to be published and therefore needs the completion of the use cases. Here you will find a good example that helps you to describe the Use Case.  The free translations can only be guaranteed for the solutions that have been published by 24.1.2020. If you have forgotten your login data, you can reset your password here.

Thanks a lot!

Your DRIVER+ team

Dear PoS/TGT users,

Following some last moment requests by the users, a decision was made to change the "DRIVER+/CMINE Top 3 Innovative Solutions in Crisis Management 2020" contest deadline.

New, and final deadline is January 20th 2020.

You can use this additional time to further improve the presentation of your solutions as well as to add new solutions to the contest in the last moment. There will be no penalty for "late application", but the January 20th deadline is final. At the deadline, a snapshot of the solution descriptions wil lbe made for the judges and no further entries or improvements will be considered in the contest.

Please also double-check how your solution is presented on the site and notify us if you discover any issues with rendering so that we can fix it if necessary. For any additional help, please join our webinar tomorrow (January 16th 2020).

2019 has been a very busy year for the DRIVER+

Sündmus, kus süstemaatiliselt hinnatakse olemasolevate ja tekkivate vajaduste lahendusi nii, et praktikud saaksid seda rakendada järgides praktilist ja süstemaatilist lähenemisviisi.

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Guidance Tool and Portfolio of solutions. The number of solutions grew, the platform matured and became more user friendly, the Disaster Competence Network Austria became our first cooperation partner that will use PoS as a web database backend for the Austrian

Kriisi- ja katastroofiohje

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community.  The “strategic gaps” from DKRMC and IFAFRI were introduced to a platform and the CM-functions taxonomy updated to improve the automated matching between gaps and solutions.

Moreover, the site has been “noticed” by the Google and appears at or near the top for such generic searches as “CDM solutions catalogue” or “CDM gaps catalogue” (or portfolio) as well as for many solution-specific searches.

Recently, the “multilingual PoS” has been launched and the site is  translated to German now. And yes, this includes your user profiles, your organisations, gaps, solutions, menus and most help texts. Automated translation to Dutch, French, Italian, and Polish as well as the professional translation to (at least) German replacing the one we have today is on the TODO list.  

In short, the life is good and the PoS/TGT team is looking forwards to the end of the year festivities and wishes you and your friends and family a wonderful time.

Dear PoS/TGT users,

Due to an unforeseen appointment, the PoS/TGT webinar on 12/12/2019 will start one hour later than scheduled, at 15:00 CET. 

We are looking forwards to seeing you and discussing the use and usability of the site, new multilingual features and any other PoS/TGT related questions.

Dear PoS/TGT users,

All PoS solutions have been translated to German today. The translation is by an automated service, but it's better than one would expect. Still, don't expect too much. (We shall be adding better translations at a later stage.)

Translation mostly works as designed, but sometimes the German translations are too long. This mainly happens in "short summary", but it can also happen if (too) long descriptions are added to the images. Please keep the unformated texts short, more than 200 characters can already cause problems with German translations.

I have also enabled automated translating. Every time when you update the english version of the Solution, a new translation should be generated. Please keep in mind that this is experimental feature. If you notice any issues, please report them.

Update: french translation started.

Dear Pos/TGT users,

We are currently translating (most of) the PoS/TGT contents to German. If everything goes well, the “Christmas edition” of the PoS should feature German translations of the front page, menus,

Kriisi- ja katastroofiohje

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gaps, solutions, taxonomy terms, user profiles, organization profiles, CDM terminology, and possibly also trials and help texts.

This will give your contents (solutions, trials) even more visibility and help the practitioners and other CDM stakeholders that aren't proficient in English. Additional languages will be added once the German version of the site has been fully tested(*). 

For discussion and more information, please join our next webinar on 12/12/2019.

Generic site search

We have implemented a new full-site search for users, organizations, gaps, solutions, trials and more on the development site. While not as powerful as the dedicated solution search, such generic search could help new users to easily discover whatever they are looking for. Which opens another question: since new “organizations” and “users” pages are quite presentable and useful, should we allow anonymous users to see your user profiles and contact you using the contact form?

Dear PoS/TGT users,

We are happy to announce that the PoS/TGT site is now far easier to use on a smartphone. In particular, the solution search page is easy to use on the small screens and should be more responsive too. Moreover, we have further improved the cross-linking of solutions, gaps, various taxonomy terms, users and organisations. For example, this is how the AIT page at PoS looks like now:

Similar cross-linking has also been implemented for the user pages and for the solutions. Furthermore, the "similar solutions" matching has been further improved and a simple "all users" page implemented at https://pos.driver-project.eu/en/user/all. Finding and contacting you through PoS/TGT has never been easier (and yes, we have implemented sufficient anti-spam measures).