DNA.gov

DNA technology is becoming vital to ensuring accuracy and fairness in the criminal justice system. DNA can be used to identify criminals with incredible accuracy when biological evidence exists, and DNA can be used to clear suspects and exonerate persons mistakenly accused or convicted of crimes.

DNA Initiative

The DNA Initiative calls for increased funding, training, and assistance — to Federal, State, and local forensic labs; to police; to medical professionals; to victim service providers; and to prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges— to ensure that this technology reaches its full potential to solve crimes, protect the innocent, and identify missing persons.

The DNA Initiative has many goals in its research. Above all, it is to help protect the innocent, but the initiative also strives to eliminate the current backlog of unanalyzed DNA and biological evidence for most serious offenses. This includes rapes, murders, and kidnappings. Other goals include improvement of crime laboratories' capacities to analyze DNA samples in a timely fashion. The DNA initiative is also trying to advocate the use of DNA to solve missing person cases and identifying human remains.

DNA.gov

By creating DNA.gov, the DNA initiative wants to allow non technical persons to develop website content, which includes e-learning modules, with minimal training. The site then wants to deliver that training to a broad, distributed audience at minimal cost. With the hopes of delivering accessible content to the widest possible audience, the website hopes to enable users to self-register for their 19 online courses that are sharable across the portal website. With the 19 courses available online, more than 28,000 users have already registered for one or more of these courses.

Devis and the NIJ

The National Institute of Justice uses EZRO, Devis created web presence system for managing on-line content, e-learning, and coaching, to meet all of their online objectives. The EZRO content management system enables NIJ to provide information and training courses about the science of DNA to the general public, first responder field personnel, and subject matter experts. Users are able to self-register for any of the courses offered, track their progress and receive a certificate upon completion. Many of the courses include quizzes as a knowledge check for the users as well as flash videos and animation that provide users with an interactive view of a crime scene to aid in learning.

Awards

The DNA.gov website was awarded "Best Federal Website" at the "Web Managers Best Practice Awards" for 2006. A panel of Federal web managers selected DNA.gov in the specialized audience category. The decision criteria included evaluation of best practices in content and interactivity, design/usability and accessibility, and usage evaluation metrics.