Over the past six months, SecondMuse has been working with the World Bank to develop a collaborative online community dedicated to better understanding natural disaster risk and harnessing new technological innovations to address risk in the world’s most vulnerable communities.  The online community, www.understandrisk.org, has engaged thousands of technical experts and practitioners from over 130 countries around the world in sharing their experiences and knowledge in preparing for, and responding to, natural disasters.  The collaborative online global community served as a forum to harness the energy and expertise of practitioners with many diverse backgrounds in disaster risk management, enable them to share ideas across disciplines and national borders, and to spur the development and use of new innovations and technologies in the field of disaster risk.

The online discussions on the Understanding Risk Community site formed the basis of the recent Understanding Risk Forum, held at the World Bank in June 2010, where over 400 experts and practitioners from around the world traveled to Washington, D.C. to share their work and learn from one another. Sessions covered topics as diverse as using state-of-the-art satellite imagery to model risk, to crowdsourcing for risk assessment, to the challenges of perceiving and communicating risk.

The Understanding Risk Forum was far from your traditional conference.  From the user-generated content to the opening night Ignite talks about each session topic, to the integration of Twitter and live webstreaming to engage the global online community, the Understanding Risk Forum was innovative in its model as well as its content.  In addition to participating in the conceptual and content development of the Understanding Risk Forum, Todd Khozein, SecondMuse, also presented on the impact of new media on disaster risk as part of the Perceiving and Communicating Risk panel.

The Understanding Risk Forum has come to a close, but the online community continues to grow and develop as a virtual gathering place for experts worldwide to communicate, connect and enhance their own work through discussion and collaboration with other practitioners.