Liveblogging on BRIDGE at Gov 2.0 Camp

Note: this is a liveblog of a session at the Gov 2.0 BarCamp on BRIDGE about open software development for the United States Intelligence Community. His site is http://matthewburton.org/a-space

In the 1990s, every agency had their own network that did not touch. IN the late 1990s, the IC created Intelink to start to connect information at different agencies.  Alas, classification restrictions kept agencies from posting their valuable information.

A-Space is Facebook for Spies and it is supposed to be the answer to this.  It is NOT Myspace for Spies, because Facebook is far more advanced as a platform than MySpace.

Why does it take so damn long to get technology to the government? the RFP process: put out a request, months later we get bids and then years later you finally get the software that people want.  Usually, this software doesn’t actually solve the problem because the development is all done in a closed cycle without input from the people who will have to use the tool.

A-Space is supposed to, via BRIDGE, is supposed to help people get their apps onto the system.  A-Space is built on Clearsapace and is a platform on the IC’s classified network for Intelligence analysts.  BRIDGE hopes to make it possible for individual developers and smaller companies to contribute applications.  BRIDGE can be used by anybody who is sponsored into the environment (unclassified).  Bridge strives to be a sandbox for proof of concept for developers to show their tools before being pulled up to operational/classified networks.

Problem with BRIDGE is that it is low and does not necessarily have a community of users.  Another problem is that BRIDGE doesn’t offer a great solution on how to find software solutions.

BRIDGE is seeking a larger pool of web applications, which A-Space will be a platform for delivery.  BRIDGE is designed to open up the sofware development process for the government.

Forge.mil is an unrelated project, but is designed to serve as a software repository for the military domain.  RACE is designed to serve as a DISA bridge to operational domains.

PS Sorry this is incomplete and sparse, but I did the best I could.

Facebook for the Enterprise

There’s been a lot of hype around social networking and social network analysis as of late.  Time magazine called “Facebook for Spies” (and again yesterday) one of it’s top 50 inventions for 2008.  A number of other organizations are focused on deploying internal social networking solutions, so that their employees can better keep up with their colleagues.  But the question that sometimes remains in the ether is why are companies doing this? As an aside, I sometimes wonder whether organizations understand why they are deploying social networking services, but that’s another issue.

What’s the Point?

To me, the reason for deploying social networking services is clear: Work is really not that different from “real life”.  Think about this (preferably with an open mind): Why do you use Facebook? I can’t speak for anybody else, but it’s a number of things for me:

• It’s a big address book with almost all of my friends in it
• It’s a great way to contact friends
• It lets me figure out what friends are doing with relatively minimal effort

I think these three reasons are the primary reasons that most people use Facebook, whether they realize it or not.  Now swap out the word “friends” for “colleagues”, and you have your reasons for corporate social networking services.

It’s about People

Social networking services, at least the good ones, are brilliant because they allow people to connect to people.  That’s one of the core principles for my job (the other two being connecting people to data and data to data), and ultimately, that’s the part of collaboration that most technical solutions miss: it’s telling that a Gartner conference on collaboration that I attended last year had the word “Portals” in it.  To me, there’s nothing less collaborative than a portal because it completely ignores the “people” aspect of collaboration.  Really? A common website makes a community of interest? Everyone uses Google as a portal to the web, but nobody surmises that all Internet users are really a community of interest.

The beauty of Facebook is that it is a technology that is completely built to facilitate interactions between people.  There’s not a whole lot more to it than that, at least to me.  Collaboration is about people.  It requires that you connect people, that people communicate, and that you can rally the necessary people behind a problem when the metaphorical balloon goes up.