The social impact of Networks of Practitioners in EU Security Research

Security practitioners’ organisations are increasingly facing challenges to respond to current and emerging security threats. Firefighters, police and intelligence communities, border guards, custom authorities, explosive specialists, forensic laboratories, medical emergency teams, etc., are experiencing difficulties in freeing resources from their daily operations and involving them in innovation and research activities that could prove to be useful to their operations. As such, security practitioners, i.e., the end users, have limited opportunities to interact with the solution provider community that is academia, industry, and small-medium enterprises. Moreover, although end users are aware of the capability gaps they are experiencing and the solutions they need to address them, they cannot by default – and by nature - communicate publicly their shortcomings. Hence, they often map out their capability gaps to existing solutions and issue specifications and performance metrics for products they would like to acquire, or they communicate their needs to “trusted” suppliers. The end users are not interacting as needed with the supply side, and further, they are facing hurdles to communicate their capability needs because of numerous sensitive issues related to civil ad state security. The European commission funded the Pan European Networks (PEN) of practitioners and other actors in the field of security (https://cordis.europa.eu/programme/id/H2020_SEC-21-GM-2016-2017)  to eliminate communication barriers between the security demand and supply sides. Thus, security practitioners - via these networks of practitioners - were offered opportunities to monitor research and innovation projects and to provide their expert opinion and guidance to solution developers. Moreover, a network of practitioners made from security experts across the Europe offered a sense of anonymisation to end users so as to convey on time and accurately their capability gaps and performance requirements’ needs to solution providers, and more importantly, to communicate a security needs roadmap to the security supply side.The research of Solans-Domènech et al. was used in four surveys (migration and asylum management, border management, tackling cross border crime and terrorism, and mitigating natural disasters) to assess whether the networks of practitioners were successful in their objectives. Four online questionnaires were designed in order to capture a wide range of perspectives and assess the social impact of the thematic communities’ work. A set of common questions was administered across all communities to identify overarching trends and patterns, while specific questions were tailored to each thematic community to capture their unique aspects and effects. This approach allowed for a comprehensive understanding of both the shared and the distinct social impact of the MEDEA Project. The survey asked all practitioners if they believe they are well equipped to respond to current and emerging security challenges, and whether they should collaborate with fellow practitioners from other security organisations and countries to jointly identify and document their operational needs. It then asked them to rate the level of communication and interactions they have with solution providers. It further questioned if the use of operational scenarios assisted practitioners to identify their capability gaps, and afterwards asked practitioners to indicate if it would benefit the security stakeholders to have these capability gaps documented in a common format. Moreover, the survey asked practitioners to prioritise the root causes of their identified capability gaps, and to indicate whether the operational objectives of each security organisation are related with the performance expectations of security solutions. The last part of the common survey pertained to whether the practitioners feel confident to use State Of The Art (SOTA) security solutions, if innovative technologies can be easily misused and if the activities of the Networks of Practitioners significantly benefit security stakeholders.