March 26, 2014
By: Suzette McLeod, BJA NTTAC Deputy Director
The Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) National Training and Technical Assistance Center (NTTAC) just launched a new online tool that helps BJA’s TTA partners further coordinate their efforts to serve the nation’s state, local, and tribal justice professionals. BJA’s TTA providers offer enhanced value to the field when their expertise is augmented by the awareness of other program and partner activities and resources. BJA is looking forward to leveraging the new TTA Collaboration Portal to enable and enhance collaboration across BJA’s diverse community of TTA providers.
BJA’s TTA providers are an extraordinary collection of organizations who offer a very diverse range of justice services and expertise. BJA NTTAC developed BJA’s TTA Collaboration Portal to help each BJA provider and staff person find ways to better harness the immense power of this collective TTA community. Many BJA partners have long recognized that TTA activities and engagements should be informed by other TTA activities or resources (people, research, protocols, and tools) to maximize their success in helping agencies benefit from the adoption and use of the following:
- BJA’s programs;
- evidence-based and promising practices;
- the ever-growing inventory of BJA- funded resources and research; and
- the transformation of potentially duplicative work into synchronized assistance.
- Posting areas provide virtual places for users to post messages, with optional attachments, tags, and links, and reply with comments. These posting areas are organized around ‘Interest Groups’ and every message posted will appear on the ‘Home Page’ along with other user actions.
- Profiles are associated with and available for every registered user, provider, partner agency, and interest group and contain contact information, descriptions, and resources. They are searchable through the ‘Directories’ tab and are accessible as links on user postings.
- TTA Information provides basic information about the TTA activities planned, in progress, or executed by any BJA-funded TTA provider across the nation. This information is listed textually in the ’User Control Panel’ tab as well as graphically in the ‘TTA Map’ tab and can be filtered and displayed in various ways. The TTAs displayed currently only include activities requested through BJA NTTAC, but will soon include all TTAs entered by BJA providers through the new TTA Reporting Portal (replacing TTARS-Training & Technical Assistance Report System) scheduled for release later this year.
- NTTAC News contains a collection of current and archived information on BJA NTTAC activities including newsletters, notifications regarding group meetings, materials from BJA TTA provider meetings, and information on requests for proposals.