Agencies Embrace Web 2.0

WASHINGTON - Slowly but surely, federal agencies are taking steps to leverage the technologies of web 2.0 to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing. The same technologies that make "Facebook" and "Wikipedia" possible are being used to help members of several agencies share information.

Kevin Marlowe, with the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command, says it was orders from the very top of the military heirarchy - and a commanding general who came into his boss's office and banged his fist on the desk - who helped mandate the use of knowledge management and wiki technology to form C2-PEDIA.

In February 2006, the Pentagon issued its Quadrennial Defense Review. And one of the things the QDR says is that we have a problem. And the problem is that the military services are each independently funded, and as a result, they build solutions to their own problems that are specific to the services: the Navy builds its own systems, the Air Force builds its own systems.

In his presentation before the 9th annual "Knowledge Management" conference, Marlowe went on to explain how the Pentagon decided to analyze and manage its major military systems through the use of portfolios, one of which was command and control, known in military circles as "C2".

Marlowe says he told his boss's boss, the three-star general, that knowledge management, using Web 2.0 technologies was indeed a possible technical solution to the C2 challenge. He adapted a now-familiar interface to the needs of the military.

"We used a media wiki, with a standard wikipedia front end," he explained in developing C2-PEDIA. He adds that the goal was not to build a collaboration tool, but instead to use Wikipedia's familiar interface to tie together information about disparate command and control military systems.

It should be noted that C2PEDIA is not available on the public internet, and is currently only available to authorized users of the Pentagon's secure network.

The same can be said for another of the Pentagon's knowledge management tools, called the Joint Lessons Learned Information System, J-LLIS for short. Marine Lt. Col. Donald Hawkins says his system is derived from command's insistence on being smarter about knowledge management.

"Knowledge comes to us from a number of sources," he explained. "All this stuff comes to us as knowledge claims, and we develop issues from there. Second, we identify and resolve issues derived from the lessons learned information."

J-LLIS originally began life as the U.S. Marines own system for shared collaboration, but was recently adopted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the services' tool for information sharing, or what Hawkins calls "knowledge brokerage."

In much the same vein, the State Department's Eric Johnson says Diplopedia was set up to meet the needs of the unique, and some would say unusual, organization chart found in Foggy Bottom. Along with a cabinet level Secretary, and a host of assistant and under-secretaries, there are ambassadors who have the same direct access to the President that the Secretary of State enjoys.

What we wanted to do was provide a high level place where (diplomats) could begin to get information, Diplopedia is not, nor will it ever be, the last place to get information, unless what you need is fairly quick and concise.

Johnson says Diplopedia was a three-year long work, and works in much the same way as Wikipedia, with user-edited pages, and the like. Also like Wikipedia, Johnson reports that Diplopedia is taking off within the State Department.

"We launched it in September 2006, we have over 3,700 articles, over 700 registered editors, and are closing in on a half-million page views."

Johnson says the number of articles, editors and page views has been accelerating over the last six months, and he expects the trend to continue.

The Knowledge Management conference continues through today at the Reagan International Trade Center.

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