The Sanitation Team, along with several members of the user community, met in Leeds, UK. The meeting was held at the University of Leeds, Civil Engineering Building where professor Miller Alonso Camargo-Valero, along with graduate students Esther Sample and Carolina Montoya-Pachongo, were the hosts for the event.
Before meeting face-to-face, the editors Matthew Verbyla and James Mihelcic agreed that the team would discuss their chapter outline, addition/removal of new treatment technologies, and determination if a table should be developed showing the primary function of each treatment technology. The group also agreed to have the Waste Stabilization Pond, Constructed Wetlands, and Anaerobic Reactors chapters completed by the African Water Week (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania). The attendees from the Sanitation Team were Stewart Oakley, Thor-Axel Strenström, Marcos von Sperling, Ynoussa Maiga. Also in attendance, as members of the GWPP network, were Tamar Kohn, Panagis Katsivelis, James Ebdon, Huw Taylor, Natalie Lamb, Anaïs Chagakerian, Bruno Nguyen, and Alexandros Marikaris; Erin Dreelin facilitated the meeting.
The afternoon of the meeting was a user-community workshop, with various participants from NGO’s, universities, private companies, and government institutions. With a tremendous amount of feedback from the users, the GWPP will be able to edit and tailor the content to encompass a diverse range of interests. Some of the feedback from the users includes:
- Adding a subsection to membrane technologies
- Find a way to address cultural and social preferences/considerations for technology choice
- Address the potential hazardous side effects of using disinfection
- Show which pathogens are relevant to different population groups
- Preference in
- seeing data about fecal indicators together with pathogen data
- table data sets on the website, but graphical representations in the printed version
- Mobile, hardcopy, and website are all preferred for methods to access the content
Three more user community meetings are to be held during 2016: Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and Brisbane, Australia. The goals of all user community workshops are to use the feedback from the users to help improve the scope of the project and to optimize the usability of the resources for regional and global stakeholders.