The National Association of Counties (NACo) has launched the County Innovation Network (COIN) – an online community for local government leadership and staff.

From NACo’s County News Alert:

The goal of COIN is to enable counties to share the wisdom of the crowd nationally, for learning, discussion and decision-making.  COIN brings opportunities to extend collaboration beyond the county elected officials to include staff members from counties, state associations, NACo affiliates, economic development authorities and municipalities to all 3,069 counties beyond conferences all-year round.  COIN is the culmination of the farsighted vision and leadership provided by technology and innovation leaders.

From NACo’s County Solutions & Innovation Blog post:

The COIN community includes services for:

• A simple registration process, with rules that ensure and maintain the sanctity of the membership, and define members’ information needs. See https://www.countyinnovation.us/wapps/user/register.

• Member-to-Member Connection to search and communicate with local government members locally or nationally.

• Information Exchange to share relevant documents and media files.

• Helping Hands get local government’s questions answered online by subject matter experts.

• Groups that organize subject-specific sub-communities to support NACo practice areas and your special interest groups.

• Community Hot Topic Conversations foster open discussions among local government members about practice areas and special interest topics.

• Top of Mind for public discussions among counties and the corporate community.

• Supplier Zone for suppliers to present relevant products, services and solutions in storefronts to engage with prospects in a standardized way.

• Link to the NACo Application Store (a partnership between NACo and Oakland County, Michigan) to share knowledge about deployed IT solutions across counties.

• Coming Soon: Link to NACo’s County Intelligence Connection (CIC) 2.0 to obtain a wealth of county data to help make accurate, informed and publicly justifiable decisions. CIC 2.0 will be available in July 2014, and its user-friendly interactive design will capitalize on developments in big-data analytics and web mapping, providing 61 datasets with 640 indicators for the 3,069 counties, ranging from county financial data to the demographic characteristics of counties. CIC 2.0 will enable users to select their county, dataset and the latest annual value of the desired indicator, and benchmark against other counties of similar population size.

Click here to register.  To discuss how COIN can help you, contact support@countyinnovation.us.