Current affairs Sharing knowledge
As the Community is an information and intelligence hub, members access a well stocked information pool that provides new knowledge and insights from a wide range of sources: in depth interviews with national and EU officials responsible for making fire safety related policies, as well as interviews, webinars and podcasts with fire safety experts. For instance, Dr Thomas Gernay, who is
assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, spoke about improving fire safety by modelling the fire behaviour of buildings with SAFIR 2019, a computer software program designed to simulate the behaviour of building structures subjected to fire. Ongoing intelligence on the broad range of laws and initiatives from the EU is also covered in another article on the project to finalise the European approach to assessing the fire performance of facades1
. Members actively submit guest articles and
are also encouraged to promote their expertise by participating in interviews or contributing to opinion pieces. In the past months, diverse topics have been covered, ranging from last year’s fire at Notre-Dame to a report on the first Conference for the Fire Protection of Structures. Author profiles are varied and they include researchers, firefighters and associations. Recently, after publishing a post on battery
fires, one Community member was contacted by the editor of a scientific journal to adapt his piece into an article for a future issue. Another member was also similarly approached after issuing an article about solar panels in the Community. A comprehensive event calendar is
available to members. Continuously updated, the calendar provides an overview of useful events happening both within and outside of the Community. In addition, the Community is an active, thriving network. Members can expand their connections through the ‘Who’s Who’ feature – an interactive directory, where people can search for fellow members according to different criteria. Members use this function to connect with people who are experts in a niche issue, or to recruit participants in a project or study. A private messaging function allows members to connect directly. Thirdly, and at the core of the Community, is a policy framing hive with a common goal of improving fire safety by contributing to public policies, regulation and standards.
Advisory panels
The Community creates advisory panels, each of which is focused on a crucial fire safety issue. To date, three panels have been launched: on data collection, on facades and on
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