Editor’s Note: An advance copy of NIST Federal Register notice is attached here.  Below is reprinted a portion of the notice.
From: NIST

As part of the NCCoE initiative, NIST/ITL intends to enter into partnerships, called “National Cybersecurity Excellence Partnerships” (NCEPs), with U.S. companies to collaborate on an ongoing basis in the NCCoE. Collaboration agreements will be based upon the statutory technology transfer authorities available to NIST, including the Federal Technology Transfer Act, 15 U.S.C. 3710a. NIST/ITL intends that NCEP collaborators will co-locate with ITL at the NCCoE at 9600 Gudelsky Drive Rockville, MD 20850 and will contribute to the development of the intellectual and physical infrastructure needed to support collaborative efforts among NIST and many sources of security capabilities, including users and vendors of products and services, on holistic approaches to resolve cybersecurity challenges.

Approaches to resolving cybersecurity challenges will be addressed at the NCCoE through individual “use cases,” a standard tool used by software engineers to define specific function requirements of a system from the point of view of a user trying to accomplish a specific task. The “use cases” developed by NCCoE will incorporate the IT security needs of specific communities or sectors. Examples of candidate sectors include health care, finance and utilities. The cybersecurity challenges that will be the subject of the “use cases” will be selected by NIST through workshops with input from broad groups of stakeholders, as well as public feedback provided via collaborative internet participation. Collaborative participation may be accessed via links from http://nccoe.nist.gov/. Opportunities to participate in individual “use cases” will be announced in the Federal Register and will be open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis. NIST/ITL envisions that the NCCoE will be capable of supporting multiple simultaneous “use cases” in various stages. NCEP collaborators will neither be obligated to participate in a given “use case,” nor will they be guaranteed participation in a given “use case,” but they will be given priority for participation in each “use case” only for their resources that are already onsite at the NCCoE and for components that are interoperable with those onsite resources, within the process defined for that “use case” as announced in the Federal Register.