Joeri van Laere
School of Informatics
Joeri van Laere
Professor of Informatics
In order to detect crises well in advance, the municipality needs to monitor what is happening in the world. Today there is no clear method for this: everyone does in their own way. In the ELISA project we take inspiration from a method used in the municipality's crime prevention work: Effective Collaboration for Security (EST). In this method, different organizations report each week what happens in society and assess together what trends occur and what different actors in society can do to respond to these events. What if the municipality could to continuously and systematically gather information in the same way to detect crisis?
The sooner society discovers events that can develop into a crisis or disaster, the faster society can act and limit the consequences of the event. The municipality has a special responsibility at the local level to ensure that authorities, business, voluntary organizations and citizens are activated in good time and together fight the crisis (geographical area responsibility).
What is a crisis?
Many things can become a crisis, such as extreme weather conditions (storms, floods), technical disruptions (power outages, computer viruses), epidemics (infectious diseases), social unrest (riots) or attacks (terrorist attacks). Thus, it is a major challenge for a municipality to constantly monitor all these areas.
Engage more actors
The aim of the project is to engage more actors to report events and to assess their consequences in a uniform way so that we get more complete and better situation pictures. This, in turn, means that crises are detected earlier and handled more effectively.
Our main activities
- Map how municipalities work today to map unsafe places and to detect crises early
- Test new ways of working (reporting incidents with SMS surveys and analyzing trends with IT tools)
- Develop a knowledge-based, systematic and simple way of working to monitor the outside world
- Distribute the developed working method to all of Sweden's municipalities
With whom we work together
In the ELISA project, we collaborate with societal actors (the police, Skövde municipality and the community protection center of Mid-Skaraborg) who experience difficulties in developing flexible and systematic processes for obtaining and managing situational images in everyday life.
In addition, two technology companies are participating who, with their solutions, want to streamline and simplify information gathering and assessment. IP.1 has "simple" as motto and in the project they will test if information gathering can be simplified with SMS surveys. Embrace Safety has as motto "knowledge-based" and "systematic" and with the help of their methods we want to professionalize the social actors' working methods so that they do not miss important information.