ECHO’s First General Assembly Meeting in Malaga
1st April 2026
On 18th-19th March in Malaga, Spain, the first General Assembly Meeting was held for the ECHO Project, which aims to enhance urban resilience management across Europe. The below blogpost by Dr Sean Travers from Carr Communications outlines the event.
The meeting began with a welcome from our project partner, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, alongside the host of the event, Diputacion Provincial de Malaga. This was followed by a project management and coordination update from our coordinator, Dr Paraskevas Bourgos from Netcompany. Paraskevas discussed the project’s completed milestones and plans for upcoming activities, including ECHO’s pilot test designs and workshops.
Then, the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) outlined the project’s technical planning, while the Institute for Corporative Security Studies (ICS) presented on ECHO’s strategic collaboration, stakeholder management and pilots. CERTH and ICS emphasised that the ECHO solutions are human-centric. This means that the solutions are developed having gathered insights on the current state of resilience, the users’ needs and the challenges these users face in urban resilience management. Among the ways this is achieved is via knowledge exchange workshops, in which ECHO’s project pilots and tools are analysed in relation to common weaknesses in resilience management and how to address them.
The day closed with ECHO’s first EU workshop, in which project partners and end users discussed the upcoming project pilots, and identified common weaknesses in resilience management and how to address them.
Day Two of the General Assembly continued with presentations from each of the project’s work packages and updates on project progress. Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM) presented on Data Management and Knowledge Integration. They examined the ECHO Knowledge Hub, one of the project’s Generative AI solutions. The ECHO Knowledge Hub will be a web-based cooperative knowledge-sharing platform, containing a comprehensive catalogue of resources for resilience planning, preparedness and management across Europe. Engineering Ingegneria Informatica (ENG) then discussed the project’s services and AI-Generative tools for community resilience, specifically, threat assessment, situational awareness, training and plan evaluation, each of which will be tailored to address diverse multi-hazard threats such as floods and droughts. These tools will be integrated into the ECHO Platform, in which all of the project’s interoperable, modular and cost-effective services will be accessible to Critical Infrastructure Operators, Emergency Service Providers and local/regional authorities.
Carr Communications (CCL) and InCities (ICS) presented on Impact Maximisation, that is, how these organisations will promote ECHO to its target audiences and facilitate the uptake of the project’s solutions. CCL outlined the project’s brand and communication management, the dissemination plan and digital communication channels, while ICS discussed the plans for emerging market opportunities. Timelex then presented on the project’s ethics and legal aspects, explaining the project’s compliance requirements and workshops completed on this topic.
The day concluded with a meeting wrap-up and plans for the next General Assembly Meeting planned the latter half of 2026. Overall, ECHO’s first General Assembly meeting has reinforced the dedication of the consortium towards its goal of enhanced urban resilience.
