PoS Newsletter 06/2021: improved handling of CM gaps
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:
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 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.