ECHO delivers an organized and coordinated approach to improve proactive cyber defence of the European Union, through effective and efficient multi-sector collaboration. The Partners will execute on a 48-month work plan to develop, model and demonstrate a network of cyber research and competence centres, with a central competence at the hub. The Central Competence Hub serves as the focal point for the ECHO Multi-sector Assessment Framework enabling multi-sector dependencies management, provision of an ECHO Early Warning System, an ECHO Federation of Cyber Ranges and management of an expanding collection of Partner Engagements. The ECHO Multi-sector Assessment Framework refers to the analysis of challenges and opportunities derived from sector specific use cases, transversal cybersecurity needs analysis and development of inter-sector Technology Roadmaps involving horizontal cybersecurity disciplines. The Early Warning System, Federation of Cyber Ranges and Inter-sector Technology Roadmaps will then be subject of Demonstration Cases incorporating relevant involvement of inter-dependent industrial sectors. The ECHO Cyber-skills Framework provides the foundation for development of cybersecurity education and training programmes including a common definition of transversal and inter-sector skills and qualifications needed by cybersecurity practitioners. The ECHO Cybersecurity Certification Scheme provides a sector specific and inter-sector process for cybersecurity certification testing of new technologies and products resulting from the proposed technology roadmaps. The project will develop and operate under an ECHO Governance Model, by which the efforts across the EU Network of Cybersecurity Competence Centres can be coordinated and optimized to provide lasting and sustainable excellence in cybersecurity skills development; research and experimentation; technology roadmaps delivery; and certified security products for improved cybersecurity resilience.

EU Personnel in Conflict Prevention and Peace Building missions come from diverse organizations and nations, yet must coordinate together in the temporary network or umbrella organization that comprises each CPPB mission. Coordination is challenging strategically and operationally. Even if the structures to coordinate together are in place, diversity in organizations (militaries, police forces, civil organizations), gender and culture (national, ethnicity, religion) make understanding of diverse personnel, and effective communication and cooperation in contexts of diversity difficult yet vital in order to achieve CPPB missions' goals. Current training puts few resources into training personnel in these critical soft skills. Gaming for Peace (GAP) provides an efficient and effective means of developing and delivering a curriculum in those skills. Deriving a base curriculum from CPPB relevant soft skills and end user identified training gaps in this area, GAP designs a multiple player online role playing game which simulates scenarios from CPPB missions. The GAP project launches an iterative process of curriculum development and refinement through end users (military, police and civilian personnel) evaluating the game and embedded base curriculum by playing the game and in doing so, bringing their own experiences to the game, thus further developing the curriculum of CPPB relevant soft skills. The game can be accessed anywhere via the Internet and there is no limit on the number of personnel who can be trained. The game can be customized at low cost by different stakeholders. The GAP consortium is multidisciplinary with expertise in the social sciences, computer science, end users (including militaries and police), and SMEs in game design, curriculum development and skill standardization and harmonization, and has support from stakeholders including the ESDC, UN bodies and NATO.