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About us

GLOWACON is a global consortium promoting wastewater and environmental surveillance (WES) for public health. Its mission is to establish a worldwide sentinel system for early outbreak detection, real-time monitoring, and pandemic preparedness. By creating a voluntary, cross-border network for data sharing, the initiative aims to enable faster, more effective responses to health threats, saving lives and protecting communities.

Governance

GLOWACON consortium aims to build a coordinated global wastewater and environmental surveillance (WES) network. Its governance ensures diverse representation and develops multi-year strategies. Key activities include creating technical guidance, promoting ethical data sharing and interoperability, and identifying research gaps. The consortium does not fund projects but acts as a coordinating body to identify funding opportunities, maximize synergies, and guide investments to avoid duplication.

Membership

This section explains the steps required to apply for GLOWACON membership as an individual or organization. GLOWACON welcomes public health institutions, research organizations, industry partners, and civil society groups. Members can connect with a global WES network, share knowledge and best practices, collaborate on research and innovation, and contribute to developing standards and outreach activities supporting public health.

Partnership

This area presents the current GLOWACON partners.

Activities

GLOWACON is a "Network of Networks" that has rapidly established itself through major global and regional conferences on multiple continents. It has united a powerful Funders' Forum with major banks and philanthropic organizations to coordinate financial support and avoid redundancies. The consortium has also conducted experimental activities, including a proof-of-concept for wastewater surveillance on aviation in collaboration with IATA and approximately 30 international airports, with impressive results (pending publication).

Events

This area contains a list of past and upcoming relevant events for the GLOWACON community.

Working groups

To develop further technical content, GLOWACON has currently four technical working groups dealing with Technical Guidance and best practices, training and capacity development, data formats and sharing and priorities for research and innovation. These technical working groups are co-led by National Public Health institutes, leading experts and supported also financially by a group of donor organisations.

Community Hub

Members of GLOWACON can access its Community Hub, a Nextcloud based platform hosted by GLOWACON that allow collaboration between members via tools like Talk (chat conversations, meetings), Files (create, preview, edit, delete, share, or collaborate on document files), Contacts (that allow you to add collaborators and groups to work with and share data), Calendar (to track your upcoming meetings) and Collectives (to organize and build shared knowledge). The platform provides both mobile and desktop applications that you can install on your devices to be able to collaborate on the GLOWACON platform wherever you are.