WP1 Activity During September

Rogier Woltjer, WP1 lead, shares updates about progress in September.

September has proven to be an exciting month for Work Package 1 (WP1) in the DARWIN Horizon 2020 project (DARWIN) with a lot of progress made. The literature review is advancing, as well as our studies of resilient response to expected and unexpected crises and changes, for various European crisis management stakeholders. Through these activities we are discovering concepts, guidelines and practices from all over the world, that aim to increase organisations’ resilience. In the spirit of Resilience Engineering we intend to learn how and why they work well, in order to enable other organisations to learn from these experiences and research findings.

In the middle of September, Ivonne Herrera, DARWIN coordinator, and Rogier Woltjer, WP1 lead, met with the European Commission, the DRIVER project, and four other projects that received funding from the same H2020 call as DARWIN, and will all work on different aspects of crisis management and resilience. The five projects have a sufficient overlap in their aims to be able to learn from each other and coordinate their efforts to a useful extent, yet with sufficient diversity so that the projects address different domains and aspects of European crisis resilience. The meeting promises to be the start of useful coordination throughout the projects, contributing to the research funding being spent efficiently, while covering a wide variety of domains, stakeholders and aspects of resilience.

The end of September saw a useful and effective working meeting between the Task 1.1 partners at FOI headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden. The cohesion, hard work and dedication to the DARWIN project was very encouraging and motivating. The people working on WP1 can truly be called a team, bringing diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise to work on a common goal: producing a survey of resilience approaches. I am excited about how our world-wide survey is taking shape, and look forward to working together with our partners and Community of Crisis and Resilience Practitioners (CoCRP) to put our findings to use, in the coming tasks and work packages.