How EFUS keeps 250 cities working together between the conferences

A network that only existed when everyone was in the room

The European Forum for Urban Security is the only European network of local authorities dedicated to urban security and safety. Its job is to help 250 member cities and regions design, implement and evaluate their security policies together. That is a knowledge management problem wearing a policy hat.

• Nothing flows on its own at this scale. 250 authorities, 16 countries, different languages, different political contexts and different operational realities. Information does not travel between them by default.
• Connection was tied to the calendar. Exchange happened at events and face-to-face meetings. Between them, the network went quiet and the work restarted from scratch each time.
• A network of nodes is not a community. Without somewhere for knowledge to accumulate, EFUS risked becoming a membership list rather than a living community of practice.
• The audience is not sitting at a desk. Members work across cities and time zones. Anything that only worked on a laptop in an office would have excluded most of them.

Three kinds of space, one continuous conversation

EFUS needed a tool simple enough for any member to use, rich enough to show what the network actually knows, and usable from a phone. Content and community had to live in the same place, because for this network the interplay between the two is the value.

• Network spaces carry the life of the organisation. Public relations, business reviews and security updates, so members can follow what is happening across EFUS without waiting for a newsletter.
• Theme spaces hold the substance. Crisis management, radicalisation, prevention tools, and the international social and political frameworks that shape local policy.
• Resource spaces work as a permanent library. Good practices, communication videos, political resolutions, the EFUS manifesto: the assets a member draws on to build a policy at home.
• Discussion sits next to the documents. Members react and comment where the content lives, so a question asked after a conference stays attached to the material that prompted it.
• Project spaces outlast the meeting. A working group keeps a shared environment running between gatherings, and picks the work up where it stopped rather than where it started.

The months between events stopped being dead time

Project coordination improved first. Virtual project spaces let members carry forward the discussions that began in person, so collaborative work continues instead of pausing until the next date in the diary.

Email volume dropped. It had been the catch-all for complex, multi-party exchanges across 16 countries, which is the one job email is worst at. Those conversations moved somewhere searchable, where the answer stays available to the next member with the same question.

Members also gained better organised access to urban security knowledge, which deepens what they can actually do with it locally.

Through the platform, EFUS connects 250 local and regional authorities across Europe who can share their practices and also provides them with a rich knowledge base upon which they can develop their policies and actions.

A network is a membership list until its knowledge accumulates somewhere. EFUS gave 250 cities a shared library and somewhere to talk it through, so what one city works out is still there for the next one a year later.