The 4th International Disaster and Risk Conference (IDRC) will take place in Davos, Switzerland, from the 26th to the 30th of August 2012.
This biennial conference applies an integrative, multidisciplinary approach to address the different kinds of risks affecting society today, which may be far beyond any particular stakeholder’s capacity to control, affect multiple parties across geographic borders, sectors and industries. Participants to this conference are multi-disciplinary, bringing together all stakeholders: government officials, experts and practitioners, representatives from International Organisations, Non-governmental Organisations, the private sector, scientific and academic institutions and the media.
In this framework, the EU FP7 co-funded projects Alert4All and Opti-Alert, both dealing with improving the efficiency of alerting systems in the European context, organise jointly a Workshop with title “The future of alerting the public – discussion of human behavior, information expectations and technology use in an intercultural context”, on Thursday the 30th of August 2012.
The objective of the workshop is to bring together scientists and practitioners who are concerned with alerting the public in emergency situations. Workshop participants will discuss the experiences, challenges and possible solutions stemming from social, cultural and transnational aspects of alerting. Addressed participants are Emergency Management Professionals and researchers from the fields of Public Safety, Disaster Management, Crisis Communication, Sociology, Psychology, Media/Communication Science, Computer Science and other relevant fields. The discussion will be based on current scientific findings of both aforementioned EU projects. Based on the presentations of these results three major themes are discussed in a panel discussion:
The main aim of the workshop is to draw a common picture of the current findings, challenges and envisioned solutions of the abovementioned aspects in public alerting in an interdisciplinary discussion. Minutes of the discussion will be taken, and key findings will be summarized in a workshop report that is going to be published on the IDRC platform. In the long term, the results of the workshop shall provide a basis for an interdisciplinary exchange on public alerting that addresses practitioners and researchers from several fields.
The Alert4All and Opti-Alert teams are looking forward to a large participation and fruitful interesting discussion!