First Responder’s Community of Practice
The responsibility for emergency services in the United States is spread out among more than 89,000 separate and independent agencies. These agencies generally have few resources available to them to identify and adopt best practices that provide insight on new technologies or simply allow for them to work together towards common goals. As a result, each agency often “rebuilds the wheel” when faced with critical and timely decisions, when they could be learning best practices and lessons learned from each other and working together to solve problems that they each confront locally, regionally or nationally.
In order to address this, G&H working with DHS S&T and state and local public safety practitioners helped to define the requirements for and assists in the ongoing strategic direction of the First Responders Community of Practice a professional networking, collaboration, and communication platform for those working in homeland security-related fields.
First Responder’s Community of Practice (with over 5,000 members to date) provides a trusted environment for active and retired first responders, emergency response professionals and Federal, State, local, or Tribal Homeland Security officials to share information, ideas, lessons learned and best practices and collaborate on projects.
Through information sharing and active participation in community workspaces, site members are able to more effectively and efficiently prepare for all hazards, leveraging each other's experiences to meet mission objectives. First Responder Communities of Practice not only offers information repositories and content creation tools such as a wiki, document library, discussion board, and more, but also provides networking capabilities for practitioners across the country to connect with one another in a trusted, online environment.