The Global Forum on Biorisks Web Portal

Gerald Epstein led the first public presentation of the Global Forum on Biorisks (GFBR) web portal, a new collaborative tool to link and engage members of the many professional communities that have a role in reducing, mitigating, and responding to biological risks such as infectious disease outbreaks or deliberate biological attack.

The Global Forum on Biorisks is premised on the fact that critical responsibilities for the management of biological risks lie with many different professional communities, such as

These communities all share two features.  First, mitigating biological risk, especially that involving deliberate harm, is not a major aspect of their day-to-day activities.  Second, most of them have little reason to interact with each other except when confronting this issue.  Nevertheless, they will all have to work together to prevent, mitigate, ameliorate, and/or respond to disease outbreaks that are deliberately caused or that exceed the capacity of traditional responders.  The GFBR web portal is a novel approach for global “bottom-up” decentralized governance though a number of engagement mechanisms to include virtual workshops, blogs, wikis, surveys, shared libraries, and database development.

This session was intended to identify and begin to train “beta testers” who can exercise the web portal’s interactive features. 

Participation is especially sought from those who are currently active members of any of the relevant professional communities.