SUNRISE National Workshop Series: Slovenia
16th December 2022
SUNRISE will facilitate the active collaboration of CIs across Europe, to share best practices and jointly tackle future pandemics. Over its lifetime, the project will host several national, regional, and local workshops with critical infrastructure (CI) operators in Slovenia, Spain, and Italy. The goal of the workshops is to facilitate regular discussions with the CIs and gather their expert insights that will inform the project’s results. This direct input from the project’s key stakeholders will be crucial to the success of the SUNRISE outputs, ensuring they are meeting the real needs of CI operators in Europe.
The first in this series of workshops took place at the Institute for Corporative Security Studies (ICS) in Ljubljana, Slovenia in the second month of the SUNRISE project, on November 10th, 2022. ICS leads the Slovenian cluster of CI operators in the SUNRISE project. In addition to their role as cluster leaders, ICS will also conduct legal assessments of the SUNRISE technical tools and support their engineering and design specifications, along with the tool developers, other cluster leaders, vice-leaders, and Social Science and Humanities (SSH) experts
This initial workshop was successfully led by Dr. Milan Tarman, M.Sc. Marko Potokar, and Dr. Denis Čaleta of ICS. All Slovenian partners in the SUNRISE project were present at the workshop, with 20 participants attending. Project partners included ICS Ljubljana, the Slovenian Ministry of Infrastructure, UKC Ljubljana, Plinovodi, ELES, Slovenske železnice, Slovenske železnice-infrastrukture, Transport Institute, Telekom Slovenije and XLAB, who were also the workshop facilitators. The purpose of the workshop discussion was to gather the experiences of CI operators during pandemics and identify shortcomings, expectations, and good practices to improve the resilience of CIs and vital services in future pandemics. Of course, this was fresh in the minds of participants, due to Covid-19.
As is the key to a successful workshop, the workshop moderators ensured a relaxed atmosphere throughout and used realistic comparisons of successful organizational and sports collectives who lead by example. The focus of the discussion was on creating answers; to identify how CI operators can support one another and better cooperate in crises related to pandemic situations. Special emphasis was placed on understanding the public-private partnership and the current conditions of the operational environment; what is missing and how strategic and system improvements can be achieved.
The productive discussions and information collected during the workshop, as well as the experiences and best practices shared by participants, will support the continuation of discussions amongst CI operators and the analysis and research of SUNRISE within the national and international environment.
To learn more about the results of the SUNRISE workshops and other project news, events and results, follow the project on Twitter, LinkedIn and by subscribing to our newsletter.
