All,
Looking forward to this 2021 and the opportunities to share knowledge among us.
This is our seventh year of delivering high quality articles, and finally I start to feel that we are going into a nice routine of identifying and delivering articles to you.
The magazine is making a difference; with our current 20K+ subscribers we have become truly global. The possibilities of sharing information, identifying peers and learn from each other has reached a significant level. We do not see it clearly yet and we might not ever, but I am confident that we are creating “sub-activities” on a whole range of different levels, and this is very positive. It is not just a matter of being able to learn and read about fire safety a great part of it is to understand what is going on in other places and to identify people and contacts, and this is what will lead to these “sub-activities”. The magazine has turned into a very effective Mission tool for SFPE (SFPE's mission is to define, develop, and advance the use of engineering best practices; expand the scientific and technical knowledge base; and educate the global fire safety community, in order to reduce fire risk) and that is way more than we hoped for at the beginning.
I want to put some focus on our first article, which in my mind is a bit of a sunshine story. One of the objectives behind the development of the SFPE Core Competencies document “Recommended Minimum Technical Core Competencies for the Practice of Fire Protection Engineering.” was that educational institutions should be able to identify and learn about the knowledge and competencies a fire safety engineer should possess, and based on that develop courses and programs that are specifically tailored towards the practice of Fire Engineering, you use this together with the SFPE curriculum and we got a fruitful recipe. This is exactly what ETH Zurich did and you can read about in our first article. I am confident that this will turn into a success story.
ETH is also cooperating with other universities (through the IMFSE, International Master in Fire Safety Engineering) in Europe. Cooperation will be the key to future educational programs for Fire Safety Engineering, one single entity cannot do it all by themselves, there will always be areas where there will be a lack of knowledge. This last year all of us have learned how to do things virtually and to be honest I think that it has shown to be something useful. Hopefully, this year of “virtual” experiences of will open up new ways of cooperation between new and existing universities. Its difficult to do something on your own but with the help and support of others it can be done.
If there are readers out there that feel that you have an important subject that you would like to share with the industry do not hesitate to contact us, we can make that happen.
As always, a great thanks to the people who have put in a lot of time and effort to make this issue a reality.
The next issue will come in July.
Yours sincerely,
Jimmy Jönsson, Managing Editor