FoodSHIELD currently has registered participation from labs and regulatory agencies in all 50 states. Through their contributions, core database systems LabDIR and FoodAgDIR are well positioned for growth and critical data aggregation to provide real-time response and gap analysis for the Food & Ag Sector. All participants contribute to AgencyDIR, a CORE (Common Organization Registry Environment) activity, by profiling their roles and responsibilities against normalized activities within the sector. Currently comprising officials from Federal, State, and local agencies, all-hazards searching capabilities are greatly enhanced. It drives critical outreach and response activities down to minutes of effort to identify and begin to coordinate across a diverse set of roles and responsibilities that may be needed for each unique event.
As a rapidly maturing infrastructure, more than 1000 workgroups actively use FoodSHIELD to plan, coordinate, and develop new strategies for food defense and protection. More than 80,000 minutes are logged each month using our core webinar capabilities allowing easy collaboration amongst stakeholders and participants across the sector. Impressively, many of these workgroup participants represent different agencies and states providing for the first time true collaboration and coordination capabilities across federal and state boundaries.
FoodSHIELD has begun enabling national outreach and training from previously regional activities. North Carolina's Food Safety Forum held in August, 2009, was live streamed across the nation through our seminar capabilities allowing a wide population of food officials to gain additional knowledge from very talented speakers. Many virtual summits and distance collaboration soon followed.
As part of our charter, we have further enabled rapid training and outreach capabilities. A federal agency needed to rapidly train all labs under its purview on a new testing procedure. Complete training time was reduced to just under 1 hour to bring all labs into compliance with the new methods by providing a presentation, streaming training video, and live subject matter experts to provide Q & A. Further, the session was recorded for future training needs.
These are a few highlights to demonstrate the wide array of functions FoodSHIELD currently serves, and we seek to increase out capacity to further these critical activities.
FoodSHIELD has also been awarded honorable mention in national systems competitions in both 2007, 2009, and 2010. The Adobe MAX competitions look for the best web based projects throughout the country. We are proud to be recognized for excellence in collaboration and public sector projects.
