Kuopio workshop report

This is a report about the joint method development workshop held in Kuopio (later referred to as Kuopio workshop) 12.3.-23.3.2007. An intermediate version of this report highlighting the major outputs of the workshop so far was presented to SP1 meeting in London 20.3.2007. The main parts of this final report will be presented at least in SP4 meeting in Oslo 16.-17.4.2007, possibly some other project meetings and other events as well. We, who participated in the workshop in a way or another, sincerely hope that the outputs of the workshop will be considered relevant and useful by the Intarese project members and that they will have significant influence in the future work within Intarese.

This report is originally written as a web-document to be presented in Intarese-wiki and its composition is based on the possibility to link to other wiki-pages that contain more detailed information on each issue etc. A PDF-version of this report, including the most important outputs of the workshop, has also be made and sent around for the use of project members.

Introduction

The Kuopio workshop was held in Kuopio 12.3.-23.3.2007. It was organized by the environmental health department of national public health institute of Finland (KTL) and the workshop activities took place in the premises of the environmental health department of KTL. The inventor of the original idea and the main organizer of the workshop was Jouni Tuomisto from KTL with Mikko Pohjola, also from KTL, as the main responsible for practical arrangements.

The Intarese partner institutes that participated directly in the Kuopio workshop (and their representatives) were RIVM (Anne Knol), USTUTT (Alex Kuhn), NILU (Sjur Björndalsäter), UU (Hanna Boogaard), IC (Clive Sabel) and KTL (mainly risk analysis group + air hygiene laboratory). In addition there were two visitors to the workshop outside the Intarese community, Mari Vanhatalo from University of Helsinki / EVAHER project and Patrycja Jesionek from TU Delft / Beneris project during few days of the first week of the workshop. The direct participants took part in the workshop activities for varying times during the whole workshop period depending on the schedule and availablility of each. Most of the participation of the people outside KTL was concentrated during the first week of the workshop, as Alex from USTUTT was the only participant outside KTL during the second week of the workshop.

In addition to the direct participants described above, there were several Intarese partner institutes (and their representatives) who remotely took part in the workshop in the form of planning and giving advice before and partly also during the workshop. These were IC (David Briggs), RIVM (Erik Lebret), WHO (Marco Martuzzi, Martin Krayer von Krauss), UU (Gerard Hoek), NILU (Aasmund Fahre Vik). Also Matti Jantunen and Juha Pekkanen from KTL took part in planning, commenting and observing the workshop activities.

Overall it is fair to say that the workshop had a good representation from SP1 and at least a satisfactory representation from SP4. Several of the direct or remote participants are also involved with a number of work-packages in other SP's and the needs and views from them, SP3 policy-assessment WP's in particular, were thus brought to discussions within the workshop as well. During the workshop, many of the participants also had meetings and held discussions on Intarese related issues, which did not directly concern the workshop topic. The workshop thus had a positive influence in enhancing communications between institutes and work-packages even outside the workshop activities themselves.

More information on the background and setting of the workshop can be found from the workshop main page

Progress of the workshop

As could have been expected, the first week of the workshop was a big hassle. In the beginning of the workshop there was no common agreement among the participants on what is (or should be) the Intarese framework, what is the Intarese general method composed of and what are (should be) the tools to be used to apply the method. At the same time it was obvious to all that there was not very much time and resources to carry out the chosen case assessment where the method and tools where to be tested. This resulted in long and often exhausting meetings and discussions of what, how, when and why should we do during the first days of the workshop. On the other hand it was necessary to try to be practical and discuss the case itself, but on the other hand it was also necessary to discuss the methodological framework and related tools.

In between the meetings the participants worked on studying the data and describing the variables and methods assigned to them in the division of tasks, commenting and discussing contributions of others and raising questions of important issues as well as attempting to find answers to them. Intarese-wiki was used as a collaborative workspace providing the means of documenting and communicating within workshop participants and also for presenting the progress of work to remote participants. Despite all the ambiguities, unclarities and other challenges of the situation, the spirit among the workshop participants remained high and the attitudes productive and constructive. A whole lot of work was done and quite a lot of material was produced in the wiki. Although the question, "are we really doing the right things?" was often present in the back of people's minds and was also brought up and explicitly discussed in the meetings, we seemed to be proceeding, no-one just knew exactly where. The first week of the workshop ended with several open questions and only few good answers. A sense of anxiety and even slight frustration was in the air. A weekend break with refreshing social activities arrived just when it was most needed.

On monday of the second week of the workshop everything suddenly seemed clearer and all the work done and discussions held seemed to make some sense after all. Not all of this change can be attributed to the social activities and freetime however. A major factor behind this change was that Jouni spent some time during the weekend in organizing the outputs of the first week into a framework making it easier for everyone to see the whole big picture of what we were actually working on.

As we were struggling with proceeding with the case study, but had clearly produced something promising concerning the methodological framework, it was a relatively easy decision to concentrate the efforts of the second week in method development at the expense of the case study. Of course this decision was subject to the comments from the SP1 meeting that was held on tuesday of the second week of the workshop and where the intermediate results were to presented. Since no objection to this (slight) shift of focus was presented, the case study was frozen about to the state where it was after the first week. The end of the second week was mostly spent in attempting to translate the contributions of the first week into a tentative general description of the Intarese framework and method.

What actually happened in practice was that the risk assessment case study on Schiphol airport was not finished in the end. In fact, already quite early it turned out that within the given time and resource limits we could only manage to apply the so called quick and dirty method in making the case assessment, if we were to get any real results out of the case study. However, this would not have probably been of much use considering the goals of the workshop (see next chapter for more detailed description). Anyhow, the case assessment was indeed significantly useful in directing the discussions to the most important issues that required attention in light of integrated assessment method development. It is also possible that the case assessment be completed later if seen useful for some purpose. The methodological outputs of the workshop were maybe even beyond expectations.

The progress of the workshop can also be traced back by looking at the meeting minutes of daily meetings. All the contributions made in the case assessment can be found starting from the case assessment main page. More information and some photos of the social activities can be found from the social program page.

Aims, goals and results of the workshop

The original idea of the workshop was to get several people from different institutes and work-packages together to work on a particular risk assessment case using the available methods and tools within Intarese. Although there were expectations for the actual results of case itself, the role of the case study was already from the beginning intended as more of an instrumental type, helping to concretize the discussions about the methods and tools. By having people from several institutes and workpackages it was thought that most of the different major aspects and views concerning both the method development and the toolbox development could be identified, addressed and discussed in the workshop.

Aims and goals

Already fairly early in the preparation phase the aims of the workshop were set as follows:

to familiarise everyone to the tools that are being used and developed for risk assessment in the participating institutes
to identify possible overlaps, gaps, and interface mismatchs, and try to find a reasonable solutions to these
to work together on a specific case study in practice with the existing tools
to gain practical experience on the tools and methods and identify development needs
to write a report about what we learned for internal use in Intarese (or even for external use?)

Just before the beginning of the workshop, the issues to be resolved were further developed as:

What are the methods that will be recommended for case studies?
What are the tools and software that will be recommended for case studies?
Which methods and tools will be included as parts of the Intarese general method?
Will the Intarese general method and its products be totally open access (General Public Licence GPL)?

Results

The main outputs of the workshop can be found wholly on the following pages:

Tools needed in Intarese toolbox - phases and steps of risk assessment process, methods and tools available or needed
Assessment workspace (Intarese method) - description of the assessment workspace concept
Risk assessment on airports - Kuopio workshop case study - Schiphol airport case study main page

Probably the most significant outcome are the tables describing the phases and steps of risk assessment process, the methods, guidance or tools available or needed to carry out these phases and steps. Despite still being far from perfect, the tables can already be considered the most comprehensive description of the Intarese framework and general method, combining also the responsibility areas and contributions of all WP's of SP1 within one framework. (Based on the tables developed in the workshop, a more complete and coherent description of Intarese general method has been created and is presented on Intarese general method page in Intarese-wiki]].

Secondly, the concept of assessment workspace was introduced by the workshop in order to describe the main functionalities needed to provide adequate support for carrying out integrated risk assessments. Assessment workspace is thought to be the virtual collaborative working environment that binds and integrates the different detailed methods and tools of particular phases and steps of risk assessment as well as unites the users to work, e.g. contribute, communicate, document, report and manage, effectively within and between risk assessments, using one system. This is one of the main functionalities that the Intarese toolbox should be able to provide. It must be noted here however, that the content of the assessment workspace -page is still a very early draft and the whole concept is still under development.

The third main output of the workshop is the material that was produced in trying to carry out the case assesment. As mentioned above, the case assessment is still unfinished, but can be re-launched if necessary for example purposes in e.g. highlighting the linkages of phases and steps of risk assessment with the related available methods and tools.

In short, the workshop managed to produce:

a tentative description of the Intarese framework and Intarese general method
a preliminary description of the required support system to apply the Intarese general method
a basis for making an exemplary case assessment for illustrating the method and the system concept

Results vs. aims and goals

Did the workshop then succeed in achieving the set aims and goals?

We definitely did improve the general understanding among the participants about what kind of methods and tools are available and being developed in different institutes and work-packages and how they relate (or could relate) to the Intarese general method. These methods and tools as well as their overlaps and gaps are illustrated in the method description tables. Unfortunately, due to limited time, we did not really manage to apply and evaluate these methods in the case assessment. The same also applies for the available tools, with the exceptions of small-scale use of Analytica as a scoping tool and a larger-scale use of Mediawiki as the collaboration, communication and documenting tool (i.e. the workspace).

The methodological discussions mostly took place on a fairly high level of abstraction, more on the framework than individual methods. The general method description that we provided serves rather as a context for more detailed discussions of particular individual methods for different phases and steps of risk assessment. Therefore we can not yet come up with clear recommendations of particular methods and tools to be used in the policy-assessment cases of SP3 and to be included in the Intarese general method, only list the possible available methods and tools for different phases and steps. Also the question of openness of Intarese general method and toolbox are passed on to further discussions on the issue.

Based on the above chapters, it can be said we did partly succeed in achieving the goals and partly not. On the other hand, whereas the evaluations of and conclusions on particular methods and tools may not have been quite up to the expectations, the achievements on the level of the methodological framework were even better than was hoped for. The underchievement of the case assessment itself can be considered as acceptable, since the primary goals were related to the methods and tools were well achieved. Among the organizers and participants the workshop now appears to have been a success - it remains to be seen what will be the overall outcomes and effects in the future.

Implications of the outputs

At least the following issues can be noticed when considering the outputs of the workshop in context of Intarese:

It does not seem perfectly clear, where the boundaries of the Intarese approach are set, i.e. what should be included in the Intarese risk assessment process/method and what should be excluded
- triggers of Intarese RA processes?
- relations of Intarese RA with decision-making processes and the rest of society?
- definition and evaluation of policy options/scenarios?
- evaluating effectiveness of Intarese RA outputs?
- pressures?
- sources?
- actions?
There appear to be several important phases of RA process/method that are not explicitly addressed in SP1 WP's according to DoW
- learning from previous assessments
- collaborative working
- stakeholder and policy-maker selection, involvement and communication
- dealing with disputes
- combining value judgements with descriptions of physical world phenomena
One of the most important functionalities of the toolbox appears to provide a "one-stop-shop" virtual working environment (assessment workspace), which allows and supports:
- the dispersed groups of assessors (+ policy-makers and stakeholders, if so desired) to work collaboratively on the assessment
- integration of or access to different detailed methods and tools of particular phases and steps of RA
- effective documentation and cumulation of knowledge within and between risk assessments
- organization and management of the RA process

General lessons learned

Making integrated assessments can be very complicated and time/resource consuming.
Workshop, providing the possibility to really work together for a long enough time, is an effective way of conducting work at least at this stage of this project.
The workshop helped a lot for mutual understanding of different approaches and way of thinking/methods used.
Despite all the different approaches and points of view among the workshop partcipants, it was relatively easy to come to an agreement on most of the issues that were considered as relevant and important in relation to this project's goals.

Individual comments from the participants

Put your personal comments that you think are not shared by everyone here

It was very nice and helpful to get to know the others in a more personal way as this will surely improve the communication in the future (Alex Kuhn).
It was very helpful to discuss things in detail, and not stay on the surface (like in most meetings) (Alex Kuhn).

The contents of the intermediate report have been merged to the current text where applicable. The whole intermediate version can be found following the link: [1]

Jouni's e-mail to Clive moved to SP1 general information page

Noise policy figure and descriptions moved to case study main page