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July 31, 2009
By Dorothy Ramienski
Federal News Radio
FederalNewsRadio
has told you about Virtual Alabama -- a program created by the Alabama state Homeland Security Department using a Google Earth platform to give first responders a real time view of what is happening.
Virtual Alabama has been widely recognized and has won scores of national awards.
Yet there never has been a similar program across the country -- until now.
A number of states are working with the federal Homeland Security Department on Virtual USA.
Robert Greenberg is a consultant with DHS and he is the CEO of G&H International and talked more about the project with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris on the Daily Debrief.
Greenberg said that, in addition to looking at Virtual Alabama, DHS sought information on Virginia's interoperability program.
He added that, while each state uses different technologies, both programs were born out of necessity.
"They started from a very different situation, though, interestingly enough, they both started from a failure of the . . . Department of Homeland Security to accomplish something. In Alabama it was the hurricanes. In Virginia, I think it was a flood. They basically started from an emergency operations perspective . . . and, frankly we had them both at a conference that was sponsored by DHS S&T . . . and had them in a room and asked, 'Could you guys share information?'"
Out of this meeting and sharing of technological information came the knowledge for a virtual national operations platform.
Now, DHS is conducting multiple pilots to see what works best.
"What we're really looking at is how what everyone calls Web 2.0 technologies, with their focus on openness and transparency and standards based technology, can really help not only create a technical shift on how this is done, but a cultural shift to enable the sharing."
The most ambitious of the pilot programs involves seven states and is called a Regional Operations Platform Pilot.
The Gulf Coast states of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Florida are involved, as well as Georgia and Virginia.
"They're in phase one of the pilot. They are working through two working groups -- one on technical and one on operational -- and they've agreed to share a data demonstration in late October. So, they have recently met in Mobile, Alabama and created a governance charter. What's interesting about this is when we started this pilot, only two states had any kind of platforms. Now they all do."
The states are sharing things such as data, software code and best practices involving collaboration platforms.
"Through the lessons learned and what we kind of call a working circles approach, we intend to basically grow this and make it available on a national basis."
Greenberg said that he expects all 50 states to have some sort of pilot program within the next two to three years.
He also said there is another goal involved with these pilot projects.
"There will be leave-behinds. There will be contacts created among the states. They'll be using this on a regular basis."
Finally, Greenberg said that the hope is to eventually get everyone on board, from the local level all the way up to the federal level at Homeland Security; and, as the word spreads, he added that it seems to be a reasonable goal.
"DHS -- everywhere we go -- FEMA [and] other places, we've gotten a lot of requests that say, 'Give us a briefing on this. Show us the capabilities. This seems like something we want to embrace -- something we want to work with'."
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