Update on CBRA website in April 2016

In today’s CBRA Blog we explore the latest developments at the www.cross-border.org website

First update: As part of the FP7-project CORE, our research institute CBRA is responsible for maintaining and updating the so called “FP7-CORE Information Observatory”, which gives you 10-15 regular reviews and updates per month on supply chain security and trade facilitation policies, regulations, standards, good practices, roadmaps, research papers etc. – for the benefit of FP7-CORE partners, and beyond. Each CORE Observatory entry has a title and a summary, visible to every user. At the end of the summary we provide a URL for the source document, whenever an electronic version is available in public domain. The full review text is available only for the registered users, who also receive the CBRA Monthly Newsletter. Any user – registered or not – can search CORE Observatory entries either via pre-defined keywords / tags – most common ones listed on the right side of the web page – or via free text search. The “tag cloud” image in this Blog visualizes the most popular 40+ keywords across near 70 CORE-Observatory entries (plus few CBRA Blogs and CBRA Interviews). These tags can be clicked on our website, in order to get a listing of all reviews with a specific tag (you can find a basic tag listing on the right-bottom column at www.cross-border.org; the tag cloud itself does not support clicking…).

Second update: Since some 1.5 months ago, we have started to use Twitter actively to share with you interesting news on supply chain security, trade facilitation and so forth. We aim to tweet relevant items and updates we have run across for example in LinkedIn, in our research partner websites, in regular news sources, and – of course – in Twitter itself. Since early March 2016, our 100+ tweets contain information from the World Customs Organization, from INTERPOL and Europol, from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, from the World Economic Forum, from the Secretariat for Economic Integration in Central America, just to name but few examples. You can always find our latest five tweets on our website – the right column, middle. And, a subset of the tweets makes their way to our News and updates page – www.cross-border.org/news – where they are displayed on a permanent basis, together with the CBRA Blog, CBRA Interview and CORE-Observatory entry headings…

Third (and last) update: We recently opened a webpage with Interesting web links, including International organizations, Customs administrations and Interesting videos. The first category covers the majority of inter-governmental organizations, global or regional, as well as the trade and business associations we are regularly dealing with in our research and education activities. The second category of the web links we are particularly proud of: our goal is to keep up to date our web link page for all the WCO member administrations, 180 in total, under the five main (habitable) continents: America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania… Naturally we understand that many of these websites have their “up and down times”; URLs change; etc. – we just simply aim to check the functioning of them every one to two months, while indicating with three stars, ***, when one or more web sites are down / out of order. The third category of web links is about educational videos, mainly in YouTube, visualizing global aviation and maritime traffic and flows; EU and WCO customs matters; supply chain security management and standards by the private sector; and so forth.

To conclude: Dear reader of the CBRA Blog / visitor at the CBRA website / reader of the CBRA Monthly / University students – we would love to hear back from you if you find any of this content on our website useful in your daily work or studies… And please feel free to suggest us any additional content you would like us to include at www.cross-border.org – for the benefit of yourself, and the broader community of our readers / registered users / web site visitors…! Thanks everyone, Juha.