The Coalition for Canadian Police Reform has encountered a major gap in the accessibility of reports, studies, news items and research papers that are relevant to police education in Canada and around the world. Some of these materials are digitally archived in government websites. Others are available by manual searches on academic library search engines. Others are within newspaper archives and still others are current news items in the popular press. They are all from open sources.

To further our educational outreach across Canada we need to gather these materials or the links to these materials and place them within a searchable database. We believe the project would sequence as follows:

1. Define project phases by determining priorities and sequencing of the components of the work and by limiting the scope of each phase so that the team members can complete the work within the available hours funded by Level UP.
2. Work to be concluded could be as follows:

• Determine how to automate the search and collection of relevant materials. Type of software? / Which types of materials are easily collected?
• Determine the type of database. It could be proprietary like Zotero.org. Or built by the student team.
• Determine the search methodology. We believe that each link or publication could have key words assigned either manually or automatically.
• Define the user interfaces for each phase of collection, indexing, search, retrieval.
• Develop the software solutions. These could use current open-source software or new coding by the team or a combination of the two.
• Implement and test the product.
• Teach us old guys how to use it effectively.

We are not experts in IT. But we are motivated volunteers out to achieve a transformational change in how police officers are educated.

We are retired and always available to answer questions unless in other meetings of C-CPR.

We can connect you with academics who are part of our organization: professors of education, policing, psychology.