How is your DoD organization using web 2.0 tools?

The Office of the Secretary of Defense CIO is working in conjunction with the Joint Staff J6 Directorate for C4 Systems to compile a study of how the Department of Defense is currently using web 2.0 tools, and to develop recommendations moving forward. I’m curious to see what kind of response we can get from folks on GovLoop.

What we’d like to know is this:

* How is your organization using web 2.0 tools? What tools and for what activities, tasks? Is your organization using them at all?

* How has this effort succeeded or failed?

* What do you see as the obstacles to adoption in your organization?

* What would you recommend to improve the availability and capability of these tools?

It’s already clear that organizations within the department don’t know what’s going on elsewhere, and hopefully this study will bring this to the front. If you work for a DoD agency, military command, military service, we’d definitely like to hear about what your organization is doing!

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Noel Dickover

Hi Ben, I’ve already talked with Tony Simon and Jennifer Lee about ours, but let me know if you also want me to list them here.

Brian Courtney

My company is working with the A1 in the AF on career path planning. We pitched Web 2.0 concepts to try to improve training and education. The idea being that if soldiers can self-associate with others (define friends), then we could make recommendations on training/education to try to increase participation through social interaction, i.e. you may be more likely to go do multiday training if it is with your friends than you would be if it weren’t (make it a party). We ran into resistance around the notion of defining ‘friends’ and the idea was shelved. You may want to check with them to understand the resistance.

Brian Courtney

We also tried to convince the Navy War College that who you now is as (or more) important than what you know. They only teach/track what you know. Though they agreed, they didn’t bite on social technology to help track connectedness between US and Foreign students.

Ben Lopatin

Brian and Jerry, thanks for the comments. I hadn’t logged in for a little while.

Jerry: is security a problem though on a government network, gov’t to gov’t, e.g. on the SIPRNet?

Brian: great pointer to the AF A1 – my prior guess is that a lot of the resistance is formed by preconceived notions of how these tools can be used, e.g. “blogs are what kids use on MySpace to chat about blah blah blah” instead of thinking of a blog’s operational use.