The Colorado Team Awareness Kit (COTAK) has launched at cotak.gov and is in beta for testing and use by first responders. COTAK is freely available to all public safety agencies in Colorado, and provides up-to-the-second location services to first responders using the Team Awareness Kit or TAK apps. The United States Department of Defense originally developed TAK to provide situational awareness to military forces. The CoE has conducted research into TAK for use in public safety operations since 2016, and has been developing COTAK as an operational system since 2022.
The COTAK system adjusts TAK’s capabilities to fit the use-cases of first responders and creates a user/agency management system. At cotak.gov agencies can create users and group location information by teams and events; a capability called “channels” that a first responder can select as necessary using the app. This provides first responders an interoperable way of sharing the locations of one or multiple teams, within one agency or between many agencies at the same time.