DHS S&T collaborates with Beacon NGO to broaden reach of incident command system

A new, joint effort between the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) and the nonprofit Beacon NGO will seek to build upon S&T’s Next-Generation Incident Command System (NICS) and pitch it to a larger emergency response community.

To achieve this, Beacon will take and analyze the open source code for S&T’s mobile, web-based platform, engage with responders and work with them to guarantee the platform addresses its audience’s operational needs. NICS is used by several countries worldwide, among other organizations, to allow responders to share information such as the location and scale of disasters from the scene of emergencies in real time.

“The collaboration with Beacon NGO provides an opportunity to continue to advance purpose-driven software development for the response community,” David Alexander, S&T senior science advisor for Resilience, said. “This partnership adds another level of expertise and reach to our research engagements. It will streamline NICS’ functionality for emergency response agencies and allow them to benefit from other agencies’ custom modifications.”

The NICS platform has been open-source and freely available since 2016. Currently, each NICS user utilizes and modifies their own user code. Recognizing this could lead to duplicated code maintenance efforts, Beacon will maintain the core NICS code as it enhances it, allowing the organization to collect and share real-world lessons learned from deployment and coordinate future collaborations with stakeholders.

Beacon was chosen for its work developing information technology solutions for disaster responders. In addition to its work updating and enhancing the core code of NICS, it will create an alert and notification system for citizen engagement and access by NICS users.