EIIP Virtual Forum Presentation — February 9, 2011
CEMR Network
Addressing the Challenges and Meeting the Needs of
Comprehensive Emergency Management Research
Daniel Martin, Ph.D, CEM®
Board Member, CEMR Network
Managing Principal, Integrated Solutions Consulting
Micheal Kemp, Ph.D, CEM®
Board Member, CEMR Network
Faculty Chair, School of Public Service Leadership, Capella University
Daiko Abe
Board Member, CEMR Network
Amy Sebring
EIIP Moderator
The following has been prepared from a transcription of the recording. The complete slide set (Adobe PDF) may be downloaded from http://www.emforum.org/vforum/CEMR/CEMRnetwork.pdf for ease of printing.
[Welcome / Introduction]
Amy Sebring: Good morning/afternoon everyone and welcome back to EMForum.org. I am Amy Sebring and will serve as your Moderator today. We are very glad you could join us. For our newcomers, we will be providing some instructions as we go along so you can relax and participate with us.
Today we are featuring the efforts of one of our EIIP Partners, the Comprehensive Emergency Management Research Network (CEMRN). The vision of the network is to offer an open forum that connects researchers and professionals world-wide and to provide a venue for sharing interests in emergency management research topics.
[Slide 1]
Now it is my pleasure to introduce today’s guests. We are pleased to welcome three distinguished members of the CEMR Network Board of Directors:
As Managing Principal of Integrated Solutions Consulting, Dr. Daniel Martin actively consults on various emergency management topics and teaches for several universities. Dr. Martin is a Certified Emergency Manager and currently sits on the IAEM CEM Commission.
His colleague, Dr. Micheal Kemp, also a CEM, currently serves as Faculty Chair in the School of Public Service Leadership at Capella University for Homeland Security, Emergency Management, Fire Services and Leadership.
Last but not least, Daiko Ape holds degrees in communications and international relations, and is actively pursuing advanced degrees in Emergency Management.
Please see today’s Background Page for further biographical information. The CEMR Network site can be accessed from either our home page or the Background Page.
Welcome to you all gentlemen and thank you very much for taking the time to be with us today. I now turn the floor over to Dr. Kemp to start us off please.
[Presentation]
Micheal Kemp: Thank you for that introduction. We are going to get started with our PowerPoint presentation. I want to thank everybody for joining us and allowing us the opportunity to share what the CEMR Network is about and get this information out there.
[Slide 2]
We’ll give you a basic agenda of what we’re going to talk about. Obviously, we’re going through the introduction. Then we’re going to talk about the challenges of EM Research, meeting the needs of the EM field, and the objectives of the CEMRN (Comprehensive Emergency Management Research Network), and then our vision in the future. I’m going to do the first two parts (the challenges and meeting the needs) and Dr. Martin will talk about the objectives and the future.
[Slide 3]
What I’d like to do is set this up a little bit. First of all, the CEMRN was set up by emergency managers for emergency managers for the advocacy of emergency management. With that, another thing I need to say is that we recognize that emergency management doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There are many fields and many partners that are intimately connected when we’re talking about emergency management.
At the same time, emergency management is its own discipline. Emergency management is the study and practice of the structures and processes of mitigating in, preparing for, and recovering from and responding to hazards and disasters. If you understand those two principles, you understand where the CEMR Network is coming from—and that is advocating for emergency management issues. With that advocacy, there is a lot of challenges that meet the profession that we are trying to address.
[Slide 4]
First and foremost, if you understand that notion that emergency management is a discipline or an emerging profession, then you realize that the craft has to be theoretically based and practically applied. What do I mean when I say that? What I mean is that the practice of emergency management has to be grounded and embedded in research.
The field simply cannot afford to base the practice of emergency management on policy, bureaucratic whims, philosophy or logical intuition. That is not how a profession operates. If you operate like that as a profession, you’ll never have a profession and you’ll never have a connected cadre of knowledge or a connected field of literature and research and practice you can draw from.
If you look at this slide, you can see that there is a disconnect between the academic and practice. That is what the CEMR Network is trying to accomplish—trying to bridge that disconnect between academic and practice. We want to get to a point in this field that emergency management is talking as a unified voice from the practitioner to the scholar and back again to the practitioner.
[Slide 5]
In bridging that path from practitioner to academic, there are a lot of challenges. A few of those challenges are a lack of theoretical foundation. Depending on who you talk to, you can talk to people who say that emergency management does have a strong theoretical foundation, and you can talk to those who say it doesn’t.
For the purposes of CEMRN, it really doesn’t matter. What we’re advocating is emergency management by emergency management for emergency managers, and with that our emphasis wants to be on the development of emergency management theories. We try to facilitate that.
If you go through the points on this slide again, you can really see some of the challenges—number three, by Oyoloa-Yemaiel and Wilson—"Must address areas of research that are specific and unique to the emergency management profession." Again, the CEMR Network is about emergency management.
[Slide 6]
Meeting the needs—connecting academics and practitioners—I can’t emphasize this enough. When I reflect upon how I came to this point, and this point is shared by a lot of folks out there, it really came from sitting in a class. I had the opportunity to sit in a class offered by Dr. Dennis Mileti—a name that all of you probably know and recognize.
He said a very important thing. I don’t know if it was because he was inspired by coming to North Dakota State University and being in North Dakota, but he said that if you want to bring people together and get a transfer of ideas, you need to treat people like cattle and get them in a pen or a pasture. If you know Dr. Mileti, that is kind of odd coming from him.
It really struck a nerve with me, and it really struck a nerve with a lot of people I’m associated with. What he was really trying to say there was that if you want to get a transfer of ideas and a uniform voice, what you need to do is create a process that really gets people milling or interacting together.
That is really what the CEMR Network is. It is a modern day virtual facility that facilitates that milling process. That is really what it is trying to accomplish.
[Slide 7]
This slide really talks about that—continuous dialog. I apologize—I know the first word up there has the negative connotation. I apologize about that. That is really what this slide is trying to say—to provide a voice for the research and practitioner community—get that flow of ideas together—let the practitioner understand what the academic is thinking and let the academic understand what the practitioner is thinking.
Get them talking, mingling, and milling together so that the practitioner understands the process the researcher has to go through to create knowledge, and get the researcher to understand that these are the issues that I need, as a practitioner, addressed. Through that process will be the foundation that we can call emergency management.
[Slide 8]
Again, foster open collaboration—I said at the beginning of this that we realize, and I think everybody realizes that emergency management isn’t operating in a vacuum. While it is its own unique profession, it is intimately related to many professions. When we’re looking at the ideas that emergency managers must look at, and we’re looking at how to best prepare, respond and recover from disasters and hazards, we have to do that in a multi-disciplinary way.
We often draw on that, where we thought we had an answer to a question or problem, and then we spoke to someone else and they gave us a completely different perspective. That is really why we have the inter-disciplinary connection, as well. At the same time, disciplinary—we look at it through the lens of emergency management.
[Slide 9]
Meeting the need—promoting research in the profession. I sound like a broken record here, but that is essentially what needs to be done. If we are going to grow as a profession, if we are going to continue to advance this profession, we need to become unified. We need to promote research and the profession. We need to do that in a unified voice.
We are starting to do that. There are lots of organizations coming out there to do that. Some of them have a disaster research slant, and some have an engineering slant. CEMRN has an emergency management slant—for emergency managers by emergency managers for the advocacy of emergency management. This is what this slide is setting up.
This all starts with what Dr. Mileti said back a couple of years ago in that classroom. We need to create processes that bring people together. Clearly that is what this CEMR Network is doing. There are a lot of different ways it does that, but the main way I wanted to get across in these few slides is—here are the challenges that face the profession, here’s how we can overcome those challenges, and here is why it is important.
With that I’ll be handing it off to Dan. With that, I’ll let Dr. Martin take over.
[Slide 10]
Daniel Martin: I’d like to add a couple of things, not to address any deficiencies by Dr. Kemp by any means, but to highlight some of the cruxes of the CEMR Network and what we’re trying to promote. One thing that Dr. Kemp mentioned is that there are a lot of organizations out there that are providing an integral link to promote and advocate for the profession of emergency management.
One of the things that we found is very important and that I personally very strongly believe in is we can accomplish a lot more as a team than as an individual. That’s very similar to organizations. A unified front of organizations is much stronger than what a single organization can accomplish.
What we want to do is try to address a void—a void that exists between the practitioner and the researcher as well as a void between various institutions and organizations as well as a void between those organizations that are trying to promote the profession. Our mission was to create an active community dedicated to advancing the profession of emergency management through research and new knowledge.
We want to provide an impetus to take in that research and the body of knowledge that is being developed and embrace that with the expertise and the knowledge of the practitioners and provide an open forum. One of the things that was really brought out to us—to myself, quite honestly, through my fifteen years of experience doing EM and through my pursuit of my doctorate in emergency management—is that there is a clear and distinct disconnect.
That disconnect is because there really is not a conduit to share information, and quite honestly, in both directions—from the researcher to the practitioner, and from the practitioner to the researcher. Now there’s a lot of publications, and there are a lot of avenues for research to be portrayed through journals and whatnot. But a lot of times researchers—and I experienced this firsthand—are having to struggle to get involved with or have access to practitioners.
One complaint I hear within the practitioner world is that the findings of research is missing the mark. It is not what is happening out there. It’s not the fault of the researcher or the practitioner. It’s a fault of a lack of connectivity between the research community and the practitioner community.
What we want to try to do is foster that cooperation and provide that network so that ultimately we can advance the profession together. The fact of the matter is researchers can’t do it without practitioners, and a profession cannot exist without research. They go hand in hand.
[Slide 11]
The objectives for the CEMR Network—it is obviously to promote the advancement of emergency management. That is something we do together, and we share that objective with many other organizations as well as many people—those that are members of the network and those that are not members—that have a passion for this profession.
That is one thing that is really exciting for me—that it is a passion shared by so many. You have some rich dialog and input and sharing going on. That is very exciting. Link the multiple disciplinary perspectives of emergency management—as Dr. Kemp mentioned—there is a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives—whether you’re a engineer, a public health specialist, a planner, an emergency manager—there is a component of everybody’s profession that contributes to this very broad mission of emergency management.
Of course, bridge and theoretical and practical applications—we’ve kind of kicked that around quite a bit. Provide an open forum—one of the things I want to emphasize is that this is an open forum. Anybody can join the CEM Research Network. We thought it was very important to keep it open to all members. Do not be exclusive. Whether you are a researcher or a practitioner, that openness where you are going to foster new ideas and create a lot of innovative thought, and serve as a catalyst to advance and improve comprehensive emergency management.
I think one of the things we have to do as professionals is be openly critical to the practices that are going on. It’s not to say that things are wrong, but that things can improve. I say we have to be honest to ourselves that improvement is necessary. Improvement goes beyond what we’ve learned.
In order to provide that catalyst to be proactive and have a proactive emergency management, you need to do that through research and provide generalized findings that can be applied from disaster to disaster, from community to community, and get out of the more reactive policy approach.
[Slide 12]
If we have time at the end of the questions, and I see a few questions popping up already, we’d like to navigate through this site. However using Microsoft Office Live Meeting, the quality of the visuals you can see will deteriorate quite a bit. What we want to do is provide some screen shots and go through it if we have time, we’ll do it in more of a live format.
When you go into CEM Research Network, before you actually join, you go to the website, which is www.cemr-group.org. That is the general website. From there you can gain access to the network, which is www.cemr-network.org. This is the page you will see.
[Slide 13]
In the upper right hand corner as well as in a window box, you can sign up and sign in. Membership is free and you can gain access to the network through your Google, Facebook, or Yahoo accounts. One of the things that is really great about the CEMR Network is that the platform that is being used is openly integrated with Facebook and Twitter. Your posts are automatically fed into LinkedIn, so we have sites in various locations and you have access to a very broad audience.
[Slide 14]
You can share a page. You can share your announcements to a much broader community than what might be on the National Research Network. Most, if not all of our members get those announcements via email and being fed what is transpiring. You also have the ability to translate the language to 53 different languages.
The history behind CEMR—we are a very young organization. We established ourselves in June of the past year. Relatively quickly, we attracted a lot of attention, which we welcomed and we are very excited about. A lot of international communities and a lot of organizations, which I’ll talk about—folks from Australia who obviously speak English, but then also France, Oman, China, and everywhere else. We quickly found a need to be able to translate the content of the site to various languages.
You can also search the CEMR Network for topics that might be of interest—whether it is disaster recovery or incident command or whatever have you—and you can find those sections of the site that talk about those issues.
[Slide 15]
We’re kind of moving in an on-the-go type of world. One of the other things we’ve noticed is the need to be available through phone. We have a mobile view for the site. It is very easy to do. You go to the www.CEMR-network.org and you click on this icon that says, "Switch to CEMRN mobile view". What you will get is what you see on the right—"Activity, My Page, Members, and Forum".
You can actually participate in discussion. You can see what activity is going on in the research network. It’s all about providing the connectivity to our members.
[Slide 16]
One of the other important features that we saw was a need for members to recognize who else is out there in their community that are a part of the CEMR Network. This is really to foster collaboration and bring those researchers and practitioners with shared interests together so that they can collaborate and create new knowledge.
It is easy for any member to update their information on a map. Simply click on the "edit my location" and you can enter your zip code. It doesn’t ask for specific mailing address or any specificity other than your zip code. That is for privacy reasons. You can also find members located near you, and you can simply chat or correspond with other members through the network.
You can send messages or post on their CEMRN page and build those relationships that serve their interests.
[Slide 17]
I want to talk about adding discussions. Discussions are very, very simple. You go to under the CEMR connection, you go to the discussion forum and click on "add" (the plus sign—it is highlighted). A window will pop up that says, "add discussion". You simply put your information in there and you post your discussion, and on you go.
You can categorize your discussion based on various topics that are already established in the network, which we will be adding as time goes on. You can share files. The neat feature about this is that this is automatically fed into LinkedIn, where we have a community of a couple of hundred that are on the list, but we are also being followed by a lot of members through Facebook and Twitter.
You can basically broadcast your discussion through Facebook and Twitter. The idea behind the research network is to promote all the people who are contributing to the advancement of the profession. We want to provide an open forum. Nothing is vetted and everybody takes ownership for what they present to the CEMR communities.
[Slide 18]
Similar to groups—we have approximately 19 CEMRN groups that are forums for very specific topics on different issues related to comprehensive emergency management. Anybody can create a group. In order to provide some vetting to make sure we don’t have duplicate groups, we do ask you to submit that request and we will ensure that there’s not any kind of duplication, and launch the group.
All the groups are available to all members. We allow organizations to sponsor members, and one of our sponsoring organizations is the American Society of Civil Engineers Committee of Critical Infrastructure. Within that group, any member as well as the group leader can send messages and announcements to the group.
We have one member who receives feeds on various topics for this situation with the critical infrastructure, for example. They receive information on critical infrastructure and they announce that to the group. It allows for sharing of information, and also for the promotion of that individual and the contributions they are making to that specific topic of interest and directly to the research network.
One of the really neat features—and it’s not in every single group—it all depends on the group leader and their ability to apply the various technologies that exists out there—is creating feeds. A lot of these feeds are informative feeds on various news topics or literary resources or what have you that are automatically fed into each site, on a second by second timeframe.
They basically work like spiders. They crawl the internet and pull up relevant information that is openly shared. We have news, literary, research contributions, and we have official government sources that come in. The whole idea is to provide you kind of a central repository for information from the research and practitioner communities.
One thing that frustrates me within the practitioner and researcher roles is that there is a lot of information out there. If I really want to find information on critical infrastructure and keep informed on what is going on out there, it is a lot of effort and takes a lot of time to stay on top of all the issues that pop up.
[Slide 19]
Some of the other features of the CEMRN are you can announce and post your events on the network and share them with the CEMR community. There is a job board that is on an automatic feed of some of the emergency management positions as well as academic positions. There is a blog where people can share information on recent disasters.
We have a chat feature. You can share videos in private. We also have a variety of different feeds from periodicals. We share a lot of textbooks that are relevant to emergency management. We are in the process of creating bookmarks and referencing search for different sources.
Most importantly, you can invite your emergency management friends, colleagues and cohorts. There is an open invite link and we encourage everybody to invite other members. Again, this is not about Mike and myself, or Daiko, or the other board members of the EM practitioner and research community. It is an open forum for everybody to collaborate and promote themselves.
[Slide 20]
Our vision of the future—currently we are at approximately 850 members that have either requested access or are actively engaged. We represent about 32 countries. I want everyone to keep everybody in mind that this is within about five months of launching the research network. We are absolutely astonished and pleased by all the attention this has gotten.
Most importantly is that it reinforces the need of the CEM Research Network. What we’ve been doing since we launched the site, and it continues, is to continue to expand the technological functionalities and capabilities of the research network. That will be something that is an ongoing effort. We tried to integrate some of the latest technologies, the tools that are out there and provide them to the community.
[Slide 21]
One thing we are actively doing is identifying sponsors and partners. We are very honored and pleased that we are partners with the EIIP and we are looking to broaden that with everyone. This again is a collaborative effort for any organization or institution, whether you are university, a private non-profit, a business, or a government entity, we welcome the collaboration. We are all in this together.
This month we will be establishing our CEMR Board. We have already started that process and we will be announcing that in a few days or a week or two. We are also in the process of updating the CEMR Group webpage to highlight some of the upcoming features, speakers and opportunities that are out there with CEM Research Network.
Most importantly, because this is all, for the most part, self-funded (not just financial but through passion for the profession) is to secure funding to support the ongoing activities and operations. This is a side thing for Mike, Daiko, and myself. It really comes through a passion that we have for the topic and love for the profession.
Micheal Kemp: This research center is for everybody. That is why there is a board of directors being established. We want active participation from leaders. Dan, Daiko and I created it for everybody to use. It is a non-profit organization. There is no personal gain for us three. We are looking for people to get involved. That is really what we did.
We started it and now we are looking to turn it over to the profession. With that, I wanted to touch on one thing. Dan talked about blogging in disasters. We are actively talking to a few folks who may have some impending disasters coming up that may be willing to do some blogging through that from an actual EOC. I can’t release the details of that yet because it is not finalized. Those kinds of partnerships are also what we are looking at.
[Slide 22]
Daniel Martin: Amy, I’ll turn it over to you. If there are questions, hopefully there will be answers.
[Slide 23]
Amy Sebring: Thank you very much gentlemen. Now, to proceed to our Q&A.
[Audience Questions & Answers]
Comment:
J.R. Jones: The National Hurricane Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, April 18-22, 2011 is a comprehensive training and forum which is attended by all levels and departments from all over the country involved in emergency management. EMI Certificate courses and FEMA training courses are offered as well as presentations on many aspects of EM, not only hurricane related. This is a great way to meet and hear the national leaders in EM down to local managers as well as academics. You can find out about attending this important annual conference at http://www.hurricanemeeting.com.
Question:
Amy Sebring: Do you have any plans for upcoming outreach or attending any events geared for the EM community?
Micheal Kemp: Let me start with the comment. That is an exact example of the type of things that the CEMRN can broadcast out there. Those are the types of partnerships that we are looking at. I would encourage whoever asked that question to get on CEMR and make that announcement. Those are exactly the kinds of things we are looking at.
As far as are we actively going to be going to any conferences and promoting CEMRN, we have talked about it a little bit and we actually have a round table going right now to see if we want to put in a proposal for the FEMA Higher Education Conference and talk about social networking and how the CEMR can come into that and how that folds into FEMA higher education and education through the practice and such. There are a couple of other opportunities out there.
Daniel Martin: I’d like to say that we are fairly young as an organization. Quite frankly, we are always at these conferences on a personal level, out of our personal and professional commitment and passion. One of the things that we see at these events is more outreach and collaboration and providing a conduit for our membership at some of the activities that are going on at these conferences.
One of the things that really amazes me is the rich dialog and the rich knowledge that individuals gain from attending those conferences, so it’s something we want to embrace.
J.R. Jones: I will post in CEMR.
Amy Sebring: Dan, don’t you have a mechanism whereby you are happy to pass along these various announcements and encourage people to do that, right?
Daniel Martin: Absolutely. Everything is open. It is an open forum for the entire CEMR community to show announcements, to promote their organizations and research efforts, their practice, whatever have you—it is meant to bridge the wide audience that we have, both in topic, discipline, and also internationally.
Question:
Amy Sebring: Micheal, you mentioned student research in the overview. I’m wondering what kind of membership you are getting from students?
Micheal Kemp: One of the things we did to promote that because I’ve always been an advocate of student promotion in emergency management—anybody that knows me from IAEM to FEMA Higher Ed up as a strong student participant now, and I want to give that back to the doctorate, but one of the things we did at the CEMRN is create a student position for board of directors so we would have that voice of the student on there.
One of the things that the CEMR Network does is allow students to come in and participate in the blogs, get that active participation in communication to those practitioners and researchers out there. It’s a place they can come and say, "I am looking to do research for a paper or research project, or I just want more information on the field in general".
We’re actively promoting that. Another thing I really want to bring up is we’re really trying to find opportunities to give advice and mentorship. That is one of the big things we really want to push. This profession, in my mind, starts with the students. We are a new profession—and that’s not to take away from the many practitioners and researchers out there, but as we’re growing, the students that are in the classroom now—the future that really is where we want to start.
We are actively pushing those kinds of things. I encourage anybody—opportunities for mentorship and advice—get on the network and help us out.
Daiko Ape: I just posted a personal message to all my first-time learners in my own academic program. I gave them three pieces of advice. The one that I outlined and made in the biggest, boldest and different color print is "networking". Any public service field, but particularly emergency management, the more you get out there, the more people you meet, the more your name is out there, the better off you’re going to be in this field.
It is just a matter of the field and how it operates. To anyone who is listening, when you see those opportunities, take them.
Question:
Bob Kelly: Should an org be providing leadership to make this researcher-practitioner gap close pro-actively? For example DHS S&T?
Daniel Martin: I think that is an interesting topic. Leadership—there is an interesting discussion on the network about leadership—it is not something that is just simply assigned. It is a matter of condition and situation that identify that individual as being a leader, or that organization as being a leader.
One thing that is very challenging to emergency management is a lot of practices in emergency management are dictated by policy and bureaucracy. Although policy and bureaucracy offer situations where you refine the process of these over time, it is void of that kind of unbiased research, where the training of research methodology—they are being trained to remove that bias and remove those misconceptions and self-perceptions and really get down to the crux of what that issue is.
The thing that is really interesting about emergency management is that it is too broad that sometimes these issues extend way beyond these policies and bureaucracies that might exist in a certain organization. I would offer that the academia—the researchers can’t do it by themselves. They need to embrace the bureaucracies of all our organizations to accomplish this.
We as professionals have to do it with an open mind and be openly critical to ourselves and within our organizations and say, "How can we do this better?" Let’s put the research, the findings, the analysis and rigor to test—not the policies and bureaucracies.
Question:
Isabel McCurdy: I'm still unclear on the differences between lessons learned and research in emergency management . Could you expand on the differences, please?
Micheal Kemp: That’s a very good question. It really depends on the lessons learned and how those lessons were learned and applied. A lot of times when we talk about lessons learned, we are talking about an event that happened in XY and we responded with AB, and that worked or didn’t work, so we’ve learned a lesson.
What usually happens is the next community or government says, "We learned that lesson—now we have to make a policy change." I ask, how do we know that lesson we learned works in every situation or every community? We don’t. That’s really the difference between philosophy and research.
When you look, and you’re just making assumptions based on one experience, and then making changes—that might or might now work. Research, on the other hand, will set up multiple instances and then tries to make associations and tries to vet that from multiple perspectives in multiple situations using a strict methodology that tries to eliminate biases and what not.
There is a difference depending on how you use that term "best practices", and research. Really, it’s the vetting process. Now some best practices are vetted. We put them through that research process, but most of the time we use that term just based on experience. That is not to diminish that experience, because experience is an important part of it. We have to look at the broader picture when we’re doing research. We have to look at it from multiple perspectives, utilizing different variables.
Daniel Martin: I agree that is a fantastic question. I know through a lot of dialog that Daiko, Mike and I have had that issue is we try to report—I just want to emphasize that lessons learned is more of a reactive approach to emergency management. One of the things that research does is provide a conduit for more of that proactive approach.
Let’s look at best practices, but not just simply what the best practice is from one person or organization’s perspective, or what they define as a best practice, but let’s look at it from community to community, event to event, operation to operation and really refine what is that best practice.
Let’s get away from it being a subjective assessment and have it grounded within the research of qualitative and quantitative analysis of what is really a best practice. It’s not the question of what is defined as best practice by FEMA, but is the analysis that supports that definition.
Micheal Kemp: The follow-up question that you ask usually after that is, "Now you just have an academic making predictions and he doesn’t understand what is going on in the field." That is now how research is done. Research is the culmination of that academic that is trained the methodology of research talking the practitioners that know these best practices.
Research is a combination that emanates out of the conversation between the practitioner and the academic. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum on the academic side or the practitioner side. You need both if you’re going to get anything of quality out. That is going back to the CEMRN—we are trying to get a process where the two can communicate back and forth and understand each other and start to formulate those processes so that the research that does come out is based on what the practitioner says and what the practitioner needs.
Question:
ACCEM: Is the DHS Communities of Practice communities and specifically the Emergency Management community complementary or duplicate of the CEMR site and membership? The COP EM Forum currently has 338 members.
Daniel Martin: I’m not in the know and I’m not sure Mike is. I would like to say that I think there are a lot of organizations where there is overlap and duplication. But I don’t think we need to look at things as being duplicate or overlapping. The issues and challenges involved in emergency management are very complex and very broad.
I like to offer that—instead of looking at things as duplication, I look at areas where there is duplication as opportunity for collaboration. We can put together the heads of the organizations to address some of these issues that are out there. I think that’s one of the big components of the network—to build that network, forum, and collaboration very similar to what EIIP is doing and has done very, very well—which is to build that network of collaborators.
Question:
Avagene Moore: I see a great connect with the CEMR purpose with IAEM's membership. Have you thought about using the IAEM newsletter for a monthly exchange between practitioners and researchers? A sharing of perspectives (Q&A format) to broaden everyone's thinking on the need for more interaction?
Micheal Kemp: IAEM is an integral part. Dan and I and Daiko and many of the members on CEMRN right now are IAEM members. I sat on the board of directors five or six years ago, and on the marketing and the training and education committees. Dan was CEM commissioner. IAEM is definitely one of those people that we want to get involved and become part of the process. We just haven’t formally sat down with them and talked about forming that partnership.
We’ve mentioned it to various people in the organization, but we haven’t really sat down and started that. It is on the list and one of those things that we want to get accomplished, but not formally yet.
Daniel Martin: I agree. I think that absolutely, not only could we have a personal commitment to IAEM, but there are a lot of organizations—IAEM is one of many, but really very much the premier organization—that quite frankly, shares our vision. We want to sit down with many organizations, including IAEM.
Question:
Amy Sebring: Dan, I think it might be helpful— could you briefly give people some idea of the groups that are already established on there? I do want to mention the fact—we saw her name in your slide—Dianna Bryant is with us here today. She is a former EIIP EM Forum presenter on issues in rural emergency management. We see she has a group on there. Could you mention some of the others?
Daniel Martin: We have 19 groups. We were very excited to have Dianna join our groups. She created a group called, "Rural Emergency Management", which is a very, very important component of emergency management.
We have "Airport Disaster Preparedness" sponsored by Dr. Jim Smith. We have the "Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources" that is sponsored by American Society of Civil Engineers. We have "Animals and Emergency Management" sponsored by Steve Glassey who is out of New Zealand, and he is very active within IAEM. "Terrorism" is sponsored by Amir Mousavi.
"EM Research"—obviously this is an important one—"EM Policy Group", "Comprehensive Emergency Planning and Preparedness", "Urban Emergency Management". One of the things that is kind of interesting when Dianna created a rural emergency management group right after the urban emergency management group was created. That was good because the whole idea is that there are so many different perspectives in emergency management.
Unfortunately, having lived in a rural setting and an urban setting, a lot of our policies are dictated from an urban perspective. A lot of the times the rural perspective goes unnoticed, but the fact of the matter is most disasters that occur, although not quite on a dollar scale, but by occurrence, occurs at a rural level.
It is important for those groups to emerge and identify and elevate the various issues that exist within emergency management. Scroll down a little bit further. There are a few more toward the tail end—"EM Higher Education", "Risk and Vulnerability", "Public Health and Emergency Preparedness". One of our most active and most membership is the "Emergency Management Theory" group, and then "Community Disaster Recovery".
Each one, the amount of activity, the actual information in them differs from group to group. A lot of that is based on the leader of that group and how active that leader is. It is a fantastic way for anybody who is passionate about a specific topic in emergency management to broadcast themselves and their knowledge of that topic to a wide group, and also to create a group of other people that share that topic and can help them collaborate with.
We encourage all of our members if you see a gap, if you see a void within these groups that you want to address, please present it to us and we’ll be more than happy to activate that group and give reins to that individual to lead that entity.
Comment:
Dianna Bryant: Thanks for the shout out. I have tried to find a forum where people interested in Rural issues in EM could have a discussion. I am thrilled that CEMR exists to provide just such a forum for discussion.
[Closing]
Amy Sebring: Time to wrap for today. Thank you very much Dan, Micheal and Daiko. We appreciate your taking the time to be with us today and share this information, and wish you continued success with your efforts in the future.
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Thanks to everyone for participating today and have a great afternoon.