By making state and local sex-offender information available and searchable through a single portal, the Justice Department made it easier for the public to determine whether registered sex offenders live in their neighborhoods.
Justice’s work on the National Sex Offender Public Registry Web site not only has empowered citizens, but it also won the department one of the five Excellence.gov awards handed out Wednesday by the American Council for Technology and the Industry Advisory Council of Fairfax, Va.
Because the Excellence.gov awards this year focused on information-sharing between agencies and different levels of government, the portal was chosen because it contained sex-offender information culled from federal, state and local governments.
Users can search federal and local sex-offender registries by name, state, county, city, town or ZIP code.
The other award winners were:
The Army Department’s Radio Frequency In-Transit Visibility system, which uses RF identification tags to provide the Armed Forces with worldwide visibility of military cargo in transit;
The Defense and Veterans Affairs departments’ Bidirectional Health Information System, which facilitates the exchange of health information on shared patients between the departments;
The Interior Department’s Geospatial One-Stop E-Government initiative, which provides federal, state and local governments with access to geospatial data at the geodata.gov Web site; and
The State Department’s Interagency Data Exchange Application, an interagency application that helps issue visas and perform background checks on immigrant and nonimmigrant visa applicants.
The winners—and the 15 other finalists—demonstrate the importance of interagency and intergovernment communications, said House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis (R-Va.), who delivered the keynote address.
“The awardees today give me a real sense of pride that we’ve got a lot of good people out there” in government, he said.
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