A recent Government Technology article by Andy Opsahl talks about how Regional Projects Could be Models for National Public-Safety Information Sharing.  The article mentions three regional information sharing initiatives as examples, including the Colorado consortium currently using COPLINK, the Navy LInX project and ARJIS in San Diego County.  I just came back from a week-long trip where I met with several i2 customers, including the Colorado Information Sharing Consortium (CISC), which manages the Colorado initiative.

The article mentions four counties that serve as “nodes” for hosting data for surrounding municipalities.  The model is a hybrid warehouse/federated approach that optimizes resources and connectivity and should serve as a model for nationwide information sharing initiatives.  In this approach, local agencies warehouse their data in a single location, which enables data consolidation for speed of access and sophisticated analytics.  Then warehouses are connected using a federated search and consolidation approach, which enables users of one warehouse to automatically search any warehouse they are authorized to search.  This approach is already in use in multiple jurisdictions, including Colorado, San Diego (ARJIS, also mentioned in the article, is a COPLINK node) and Los Angeles.  To learn more about COPLINK and information sharing, check out the recent webcast about one of the ways Captain Scott Edson and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department use COPLINK in southern California.   They are doing some pretty exciting things with suspicious activity identification and alerting to participate in the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) initiative.

The challenges to nationwide information sharing are a combination of technical and policy questions.  This approach allows agencies to share the information they choose in the manner they choose, and enables regional information sharing initiatives that generally don’t have to overcome the same policy hurdles as larger scale initiatives.  As those agencies grow their regional initiative and see the value, they are able to expand to statewide or nationwide initiatives much more easily by addressing the policy concerns knowing the technology infrastructure is already in place.

This hybrid warehouse/federated approach is a very effective way to promote information sharing from the bottom-up, ensuring that local agencies participate and receive immediate value from the initiative – something that isn’t always the case with top-down approaches.  Check out the i2 website for more on COPLINK and COPLINK A3.