Seeking Volunteers to Offer Feedback on the National Operations Center of Excellence and its Website

You are invited to participate in an exciting effort to build a new national resource for transportation systems management and operations. During the next year, a series of "Listening Sessions" and feedback opportunities will be held to develop a National Operations Center of Excellence. Given your operations background and experience, we are seeking your active participation and assistance in helping guide this effort.

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), and the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America) are working in collaboration with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to a build the Center and an actively managed and interactive website known as the Enhanced Knowledge Transfer System (EKTS) that will be its focal point.The EKTS will incorporate recent advances developed through the Transportation Research Board's second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2) in the Reliability focus area.

Beginning with listening sessions in March, we will be seeking your views on what the new Center should offer, such as technical assistance, information, training, peer-to-peer exchanges, and best practices related to the operations field. We also want your input on the content and format as we develop the website.

We envision that your participation would require a volunteer commitment of approximately 8 to 10 hours over the next 12 months. This would include:

Reviewing two existing and related websites for content and usability (30 - 45 minutes);
Participating on one webinar/listening session of approximately 1 1/2 hours in March;
Providing feedback via the websites following the session (30 minutes); and,
Your engagement via a second feedback session in Fall 2014 once the enhanced website is fully launched.

To ensure your availability, we have scheduled several dates for the March listening sessions. Please go to one of these four links and reserve your space for one time block only.

sessions for state DOTs: http://vovici.com/wsb.dll/s/54c9g559ef
sessions for private industry: http://vovici.com/wsb.dll/s/54c9g559f1
sessions for MPO, local, transit, and tollway: http://vovici.com/wsb.dll/s/54c9g55a17
sessions for academics and federal employees: http://vovici.com/wsb.dll/s/54c9g55a18

Each session will be limited to the first 25 people who sign up. Once you have agreed to participate, we will send you a meeting notice with links to the session and a call-in number.

As part of the preparation for the listening session, we will ask you to review two related websites ahead of time: the first was developed through the second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP2) and includes some basic information on systems management and operations and offers a framework for future content (www.tsmoinfo.org). The second was developed through ITE and enables users to share information through forums and community bulletin boards (www.ntoctalks.com). We anticipate it will take approximately 30 minutes to review these two websites.

Your perspective is very important to us and will help advance our effort to create a robust National Operations Center of Excellence. Should you have any questions about the project, please email EKTS@aashto.org. Thank you in advance for your support.

Best regards,

Members of the Executive Committee
Don Hunt
Executive Committee Chair
Executive Director
Colorado DOT

Jennifer Toth
AASHTO Representative
State Engineer
Arizona DOT

Abbas Mohaddes
President and CEO
Iteris

Douglas Wiersig
ITE Representative
Transportation and Public Works Director Fort Worth, TX

Linda Mason

Communications Officer

www.TRB.org/SHRP2

202-334-3241

Transportation Research Board, SHRP 2

500 Fifth Street, NW

Washington, District of Columbia 20001