New Year Greetings from the Solution Exchange’s Disaster Management (DM) Community and welcome to our homepage!

The year 2007 has been full of action. As you know, we launched in April 2007 with 550 members and as of today we have about 1250 members.  From April to December we posted 22 Queries, and in response to these queries many of you have shared your insights, for which we are grateful. We have also brought out 10 updates, where in we collate material sent by you and share it with members. In addition we 11 sitreps during recent floods and cyclones.

The community is growing in numbers and equally growing is the experience sharing through our discussions. With this happening, there is a need to grow the number of people who benefit from this sharing of knowledge. Let’s encourage our fellow practitioners to participate in the discussions on the forum so that more can be achieved through this unique and vibrant knowledge sharing platform.

In order to construct a vision for the community, we are organizing a “Visioning Workshop” on the 13th and 14th of February, 2007 in New Delhi. The workshop is being organized jointly by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and UNDP, and would be opened by Gen. N.C. Vij, Vice Chairperson of NDMA and Dr. Maxine Olson, UN Resident Coordinator.

Till now your responses have been extremely encouraging and the sharing through Community interaction has been enriching. We sincerely thank all of you who responded by providing their insights and other members for trusting the platform to put up queries.

Finally, we welcome feedback on the community’s usefulness, and suggestions for making it more effective.

Warm Regards

G. Padmanabhan and Nupur Arora