New York-based Vera Institute of Justice coordinates the Unaccompanied Children Program -- a national effort funded by the Department of Health and Human Services to increase pro bono legal representation for immigrant children in removal (deportation) proceedings without a parent or legal guardian. WolfeReiter recently worked with Vera to design and build an online application and secure hosting infrastructure for this virtual network of 26 nonprofit agencies who provide legal services to children who may be fleeing poverty, war, or other dangerous circumstances, and who are currently detained in federal custody.
This bespoke system provides very specific features and workflows that fit the special requirements of this legal service provider network, and is a good example of a fixed-cost-of-ownership solution that can scale up to many more users with no marginal cost (i.e., no per-user licensing). This was a competitive factor for Vera as this multi-region government contract was being competed. They were able to bid a system at a competitive cost that could cover a few regions, or scale to cover them all without significant budget impact.
This is a good example of a FIPS-compliant system with a known cost of ownership that can scale to large numbers of authenticated users with no per-user licensing cost.
The Unaccompanied Child Online Referral Database (UCORD) leverages the flexibility of the newly open-sourced .NET stack and the model-view-controller design pattern to implement different workflows for referrals related to releases from custody, detention facility transfers, and long-term foster care cases. The system provides provider-specific dashboards, automated matching of referrals to providers, notifications, role-based security, administrative views, change logs and other features, and went from concept to live in just under 3 months.
Given the sensitive nature of information exchanged in this network, the application complies with the Federal Information Privacy Standard ("FIPS"), which requires the use of NIST-verified encryption algorithms to protect data both at rest and in transit. WolfeReiter principal Brian Reiter led the FIPS compliance strategy, ensuring not only that system components meet or exceed specified levels of encryption, but also that the entire system is verifiably complaint and documented as such.
This bespoke system provides very specific features and workflows that fit the special requirements of this legal service provider network, and is a good example of a fixed-cost-of-ownership solution that can scale up to many more users with no marginal cost (i.e., no per-user licensing). This was a competitive factor for Vera as this multi-region government contract was being competed. They were able to bid a system at a competitive cost that could cover a few regions, or scale to cover them all without significant budget impact.
This is a good example of a FIPS-compliant system with a known cost of ownership that can scale to large numbers of authenticated users with no per-user licensing cost.
The Unaccompanied Child Online Referral Database (UCORD) leverages the flexibility of the newly open-sourced .NET stack and the model-view-controller design pattern to implement different workflows for referrals related to releases from custody, detention facility transfers, and long-term foster care cases. The system provides provider-specific dashboards, automated matching of referrals to providers, notifications, role-based security, administrative views, change logs and other features, and went from concept to live in just under 3 months.
Given the sensitive nature of information exchanged in this network, the application complies with the Federal Information Privacy Standard ("FIPS"), which requires the use of NIST-verified encryption algorithms to protect data both at rest and in transit. WolfeReiter principal Brian Reiter led the FIPS compliance strategy, ensuring not only that system components meet or exceed specified levels of encryption, but also that the entire system is verifiably complaint and documented as such.