Author: Margo Molkenbur (née Krenz), DPT
Online events and online seminars are no longer novelties. The Covid-19 pandemic has given a particularly strong boost to digitalisation making online events an indispensable format. We are in a time when working from home has become the norm, a time when social and economic lockdown exists and when all face-to-face events are cancelled.
Due to the international orientation of the Cutting Crime Impact (CCI) project and the international CCI consortium, regular online meetings are a matter of course for us. Therefore, it was clear to us that the communication of our exciting project and the dissemination of the project results should be spread both on-site — locally with our target groups — and online across as many countries and continents as possible. Therefore, DPT-I is offering a series of online seminars in which the project results will be presented and discussed with a broad international audience.
The advantages of webinars are numerous. The biggest advantage of online-seminars is the independence of location: speakers as well as participants may access the event from their computers. A thematically connected group of people who are spatially distributed may thereby be easily reached, directly informed and brought together in dialogue. Webinars offer a further advantage of interaction that information received via text or videos can’t give participants.
Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions in writing and send comments to the speakers. Some questions may directly be answered in the chat via a thematically organised moderation process. The moderator is more supportive, asking the speaker questions posed during the presentation to stimulate a discussion at the end of the talk. In addition, there will be the possibility to show videos, include short surveys for the participants, ask more comprehensive questions or give live feedback through tools such as Mentimeter.
Webinars are therefore a means of presentation that do not offer the direct face-to-face contact of a lecture, but which nonetheless allow for mutual communication even over long distances.
For a project like CCI, whose content is internationally focused and above all has an international target group, the webinar provides the ideal format through which to report the progress and results of the project. CCI can reach a wide range of practitioners and experts, allowing the project to network, engage in professional exchange, and receive valuable feedback, criticism and input from participants.
The webinars intend to bring together the relevant actors in each of the four CCI Focus Areas so that the innovative toolkits can be presented and discussed with potential users at an early stage. We believe that early communication with stakeholders and their participation will support greater openness of end users to potential implementation of the CCI toolkits.
DPT-I is hosting eight to ten webinars covering the CCI Focus Areas — Predictive Policing; Community Policing; Crime Prevention through Urban Design and Planning (CP-UDP); and Measuring and Mitigating Citizens’ Feelings of Insecurity The webinars will also present the developed CCI Toolkits. Lectures will be given by LEA partners from the CCI consortium as well as by external speakers that are acknowledged experts in their field.
Accessing the webinars will be easy with no need to download software — simply register your name and email address. Thanks to video recording, webinar content will remain available even after their delivery.
The webinar series will commence on Tuesday 2 February 2021 at 16.00 CET, and will continue on the first Tuesday of every month. Each will be one hour long.
More information on the content and the speakers of the individual webinars will follow —So stay tuned! We are looking forward to an interesting online seminar series..
