ResponDrone attends Driver+ final conference to gain important insight on pan-European crisis management efforts

ResponDrone attended the Driver+ Final Conference held in Brussels (19-20 February 2020), following an invitation by Dr. Marcel van Berlo, the Technical Coordinator of the Driver+ project and a recently appointed member of the ResponDrone advisory board.

DRIVER+ is a pan-European project with the objective of enhancing the capabilities of Crisis Management (CM) organizations.

The conference marked the culmination of an intensive working effort spanning several years, designed to improve CM across Europe, involving 4 large-scale crisis scenario trials and a final trial/demonstration, and focusing on climate change related incidents (wildfires and flooding).

The conference was attended by over 300 Crisis Management specialists, academics and technology developers from throughout Europe and beyond.

As such, the conference provided ResponDrone with an excellent opportunity to gain an inside view on the variety of CM solutions, procedures to execute large scale exercises and to join the leading Community of Practice in this field, CM Innovation Network Europe (CMINE). CMINE is an innovative platform that uses both online technology and in-person meetings to create “an umbrella network of stakeholders active in Crisis Management by linking existing projects, networks and initiatives”.  

The key idea is to break down barriers and generate greater collaboration in this field, one that is clearly contingent to the core field of interest of ResponDrone.

Lectures and presentations at the conference provided extremely productive insights into best practices and lessons learned.

One of the most beneficial sessions at the conference dealt with the Trial Guidance Methodology (TGM); a uniquely developed approach for testing the best solutions for specific emergency management tasks, and for executing large scale project exercises with in-field practitioners. This includes the use of Trial Groups as virtual working spaces for organising trials.  

On the whole, the conference provided ResponDrone with a golden opportunity to learn from the first-hand experience of a parallel initiative on executing pan-European CM projects.

Additionally, a dedicated side meeting was held between ResponDrone and the Bavarian Red Cross (BRK) in order to further foster bilateral cooperation, and this resulted in the agreement to hold an on-site meeting at the Red Cross premises in Bavaria. BRK are members of the advisory board and represented by Uwe Kippnich.