I am excited to participate in and invite you all to attend our first NIEM Virtual Executive Steering Council (ESC) Town Hall meeting! Please mark your calendars for Thursday, July 19, 2012 at 2:00PM EST. The Town Hall is free and open to everyone.

On Monday February 20th, the revised submission for the NIEM-UML Profile was delivered to the Object Management Group (OMG). A Unified Modeling Language (UML) Profile for NIEM aims to provide a standard for modeling NIEM artifacts (such as Model Package Descriptions, or MPDs) using UML.

What does this mean to you? In the very near future, you will be able to create a NIEM exchange with better visual tools. We anticipate that the profile will enable greater adoption of NIEM by tool vendors and will make it easier for developers of NIEM-conformant exchanges.

If it is even possible, I think this year's agenda is even more compelling than our 2009 event's. The full agenda is available here. Learn more about NIEM here.

The Federal CIO Council released a report this week on the adoption and use of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) throughout the federal government.  To date, twelve federal agencies have committed to use NIEM and seven more agencies are further evaluating the use of NIEM. 

A grassroots initiative, NIEM was born as a best practice developed by a handful of state and local practitioners. Today, we have adoption across all 50 states and are on the verge of international adoption. Our broad community has some great NIEM success stories because of the hard work of all of you.

The NIEM 2011 National Training Event (NTE) will be held August 23 - 25, 2011, at the Philadelphia Marriot Downtown in Philadelphia, PA.  We had a great turnout at our inaugural NTE held in Baltimore, Maryland, back in 2009.  NIEM now covers 12 domains; we’re strong and growing.  With the Cyber and Biometrics domains becoming official on February 14, and a few other potential domains forming, we look forward to seeing both new and familiar faces.