North American Day participants collaborate on international information-sharing initiatives.

At the end of August, the CIOs of Canada, Mexico, and the United States met at the North America Day 2012 Summit in Williamsburg, VA, with other senior IT officials from each country.

The theme of this year’s talks was Building Innovation into Digital Government. Discussions centered on:

• Digital government strategies
• Best practices in innovation
• Open government and open data
• Shared services, and
• Cybersecurity

At last year’s North America Day discussions, the three countries signed a trilateral Memorandum of Understanding and established information-sharing pilot projects to exchange test data for public health alerts and stolen vehicle information. The trilateral working groups responsible for implementing the pilot exchanges provided updates on the success of these initiatives including:

• The Public Safety Pilot completed a technical demonstration and exchange between the U.S. and Canada.
• The Public Health Pilot demonstrated an exchange of real-time, aggregated public health alerts among the three countries.

For details of the 2012 North American Day Summit and a look at what’s next, don’t miss GSA Associate Administrator Dave McClure’s blog post, North American Day Collaboration Strengthens Public Health and Safety.

Two other must read posts on North American Day by guest blogger Darlene Meskell include:

• Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. Are Aligning Online initiatives 
• International Information Sharing Delivers