The Emerging Tool Kit for NICS

“The Emerging Tool Kit for NICS,” will explore a series of information technology research projects of potentially significant value to NICS participants, by helping them to protect microdata confidentiality, visualize statistics, integrate large databases, assess organizational capacity for database management, and improve capacity in other realms of interest. The majority of these efforts are funded by the National Science Foundation’s Digital Government Research Program.

NICS is intended as a nationwide web-based broker facilitating access by public and private decision makers to detailed, current community-level statistics from thousands of local, state, federal, and commercial data sources. The NICS CoP is comprised of over 200 individuals—from a variety of government, nonprofit, and commercial realms—working collaboratively on the design, construction, and governance of NICS.

The upcoming gathering is the first quarterly meeting of the NICS CoP during its “initiation phase.” As discussed on April 12, the CoP will meet five times over the next year for the purposes of education, information sharing, networking, and receiving updates and furthering the work of the Operations and Program Committees in guiding the development of NICS towards an “implementation phase”.