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Gem Nexus Collaboration Platform

GEM Nexus is the platform aimed to support experts and practitioners working on earthquake risk assessment, worldwide, in sharing knowlege, debate and collaborate in the context of the Global Earthquake Model effort.

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We are very pleased to have started working with the Global Earthquake Model, in particular for the development of the GEM Nexus collaboration platform.

The Global Earthquake Model (GEM) is a collaborative effort devised and launched by OECD’s Global Science Forum, aimed at engaging the global community in the design, development and deployment of state-of-the-art models and tools for earthquake risk assessment worldwide.

"We believe that in order to have a lasting impact on seismic risk assessment and to create tools and models that can be used in all continents, we need to collaborate and share our knowledge about approaches that are used in different contexts, about data and databases, about applications. We also believe that that should happen in an open and transparent way, so that we all learn and that many different entities might benefit from this knowledge."

GEM Nexus is a collaboration platform project to support the very mission of GEM; the goals are:

  1. Provide an effective tool for distributed groups to share documents and materials and collaborate remotely
  2. Foster transparency, openness and participation of the global community
  3. Create a knowledge base on Earthquake Risk Assessment

The goals are closely connected, and to achieve them GEM has (wisely) decided to develop the project incrementally.

Our team has immediately embraced GEM mission and goals and, out of initial specifications and mockups, has worked together with GEM staff to release the platform, in its public Version 1, in less than 4 weeks.

“Working with REFLAB has been an extremely positive experience. They share the same kind of philosophy and really try to understand the needs a complex initiative like GEM has. We will continue to work with them, to include more features to support all the different individuals working on GEM worldwide”. Project coordinator Nicole Keller

For the project we fully embraced agile techniques applied to UI and Visual Design as well as code development but most of the Information Architecture and User Interface Design was sorted our after the initial three days kickoff.

GEM Nexus currently features solid group-based collaboration spaces, sensible publication flows fostering transparency and sharing, and elements for the initial promotion of the initiative and engagement.

Together with GEM staff we are working to the first evolutions of the project in term of new and improved features, but we are also supporting feedback gathering, training, promotion of the project. We will focus on usability, constantly revising and improving the results, while keeping in mind the long-term goals.

We look forward to this partnership, very glad that GEM has achieved in only few weeks the initial goals of the project.

http://www.nexus.globalquakemodel.org/