bert.struik's blog

The Risk Assessment Users Group is on hiatus following my retirement from the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC). The GSC cannot continue to support the RAUG, because it does not have enough people to supply all the services it sees as important. I will be emeritus scientist with the GSC for a year and hope to host a few RAUG meetings through 2014. The next meeting is planned for Wednesday June 4, 2014. The topic and possible speaker is to be determined. Feel free to suggest topics, speakers and volunteer to guest host the group. The RAUG website will be maintained into the near future.

Nine (of 133) people provided suggestions for which project the Risk Assessment Users Group should do until next summer. Out of nine options, two got the most votes: 1) create a list of active risk projects and 2) write a dictionary to describe how sectors use risk terms (dialects). Opinions were gathered with a SurveyMonkey poll from September to mid-November 2013. Two project ideas were written in: 1) create standards for hazard and risk scenarios to guide production of those scenarios for sharing online and 2) create a youtube video to describe risk assessment.

Risk assessment is mainstream to societal activity. Most, maybe all, sectors assess the risk of what they do and the landscape in which they operate. I come from the background of risk posed by geological hazards. Players of risk assessment in each sector seem to talk risk assessment in different ways; in different dialects. The words are all pronounced the same. They just have slightly or considerably different meaning: maybe. As in any conversation with dialects it is not clear whether the word has a different meaning or the context (culture) makes it seem to have a different meaning.

The April RAUG meeting established some criteria for what would be useful in an online inventory of hazard risk assessment projects and why such an inventory may be useful. Those have been implemented except for being able to see the location of the project on a map. I hope that can be done at some point. Presently the website is being redesigned to have a project menu link so the project inventory will have its own listing page and have a search routine.

In the next few months, the RAUG site will be redesigned to include tools to record and display an inventory of Canadian hazard risk assessment projects and experts. The structure for the list of projects will be made first. The list of experts will require some consideration of privacy issues before it is constructed. It would be best if experts self-identified and posted the information about themselves that were comfortable making public.