All,
I hope you are enjoying the summer holidays and that you are charging your batteries before going back to work again. We have an interesting summer issue of the magazine so for those of you that are up for some interesting reading (even though you are on vacation) you are more than welcome to look into the articles. For the ones of you already working, please find some time to go through them.
I wanted to give some personal reflections on the SFPE activities over the last year. Due to the Covid outbreak we had an abrupt termination on the in-person events just after (actually during) the very successful New Zealand PBD conference last year. This led to a very steep learning curve regarding adapting our activities to a new format (virtual), but this also required a new way of organizing the events but most importantly also finding new ways of sharing knowledge and information. I believe the virtual SFPE Europe Conference gave us a good glimpse of what can be achieved and what I think will be an alternative way of conferences in the future; the presentations were pre-recorded, and the authors was chatting live with the audience, the discussions were so much more vivid and diverse if compared to a normal in-person event. However, this was just one thing, the second was the development our different types of webinars, the huge success was a bit of surprise to everyone. The potential of webinars and similar tools are tremendous, we reached literally thousands of people that connected and joined the webinars. So much more than we would ever have on a normal conference (or a few of them). This format is here to stay. The most important part of this was obviously the SFPE staff and all our volunteers prepared to invest personal time and effort into the SFPE cause. Very impressive.
That said, there is a desire to meet persons again, be in a good discussion during a conference coffee break or over a beer at the bar in the evening. So, with that in mind I wanted to give some publicity for the upcoming SFPE Annual Conference that will be our first SFPE in-person event for a long time. This has the potential to be a real success and good finish of the year for SFPE.
Back to the articles, as always there is a wide spread of topics, please have a look and read the ones that you believe will be useful or just interesting to you. We have everything from façade fires, preventing cooking fires and cybersecurity, so just pick a topic and read about it.
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 October.
Yours sincerely,
Jimmy Jönsson, Managing Editor