GNGTS 2014 - Atti del 33° Convegno Nazionale

1. establish a Community of Practise (CoP) in Crisis Management; 2. create a tested and validated ELITE living document of crisis management; 3. implement the ELITE living document; 4. analyse the learning process from lessons learned to lessons implemented; 5. deliver recommendations for future research. The community of practice and living document. Communities of Practice (CoPs) are “groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis” (Gimenez et al. , 2014). CoPs enable the participants to share and exchange information, knowledge and experiences. It allows the participants to learn from both the failures and best practices from other organizations (Hernantes, 2013). The ELITE CoP consists of a heterogeneous group of approximately 30 end-users from 13 European countries, ranging from first responders, Civil Protection units, NGOs, directorates and research institutions (Fig. 1), whose objective is to improving the sharing of knowledge related to best practices and lessons learned within the European emergency preparedness for disasters. To begin the process of creating the ELITE CoP, a number of workshops were held which brought together stakeholders from a wide variety of backgrounds. First responders, policy makers, critical infrastructuremanagers, volunteers and civil protection bodies will all eventually use the living document. Some of these users will be looking for operational knowledge, while others will want more strategic advice, and so it was important that the diversity of goals and interests was considered from the start. The first three of these workshops were focused on fires, floods and earthquakes respectively. Each workshop lasted two days and participants from different countries and different crisis Fig. 1 – The Elite CoP. 396 GNGTS 2014 S essione 2.3