Building Amber's Legacy - The Pilot. A Case Study in the Sawyer Cases Series on New Models of Collaboration.

Table of Contents

• About the Sawyer Cases
• Relating the Sawyer Principles
• A Little Girl’s Legacy
• About the AMBER Cases
• AMBER (Case A): The Pilot – Origins of an Idea
• A Partnership Born of a Big Idea
• Forming an Alliance
• Communications Across the Alliance
• Forming a Consortium
• Forming the AMBER Alert Advisory Committee
• Integrating Messaging Technologies
• An End-to-End Solution
• Business and Technical Requirements
• Building the Portal
• Moving from Pilot to Production
• A Model for All States
• A Framework for Partnership
• Conclusion: The Legacy Play
• The AMBER Pilot May Prove to be a Legacy Pilot

Abstract

Nine-year-old Amber Hagerman of Arlington, Texas, was abducted while riding her bicycle on January 13, 1996. She never came home. Amber became the namesake for a campaign to alert communities about abducted children and speed their safe return. The AMBER (America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response) Alert program began later that year when local private broadcast stations in Dallas-Fort Worth, TX, partnered with "local police to develop an early warning system to help find abducted children." The first installment in the series, The Sawyer Principles: Digital Government Service Delivery and the Lost Art of Whitewashing a Fence, assumes that, by analogy to its namesake 13-year-old, government can be (and should be) the clever kid who rallies the community to act in the public interest in a way that is consistent with the enlightened self interest of the network of contributors. The Sawyer Cases, this volume of original case studies, offers real-world examples of public-private-civic partnerships that exemplify new models of collaboration for those that dare to light out for the territory ahead.