Canyon R

I’ve been reading Mark Drapeau’s Mashable column and am really excited about the Government 2.0 directions that he is talking about. I’m also frustrated, as he is, at the pace and lack of leadership that these efforts are receiving. But one of the most interesting parts was his description of A-Space.

The big development in IC social networking tools hitting the news recently is A-Space, essentially a mashup of Facebook, LinkedIn, and GoogleDocs designed to be an addictive work environment for analysts with access to sensitive human intelligence (HUMINT). A-Space will have status updates a la Twitter, subscriptions to updates, feeds and friends, activity streams, content management a la Sharepoint, a community grid tag cloud, RSS feeds from outside, drag and drop capability, discussion/question threads, a ’scrapbook,’ and widgets.

But most importantly he finishes with this revelation.

This system – frankly better than anything I know about in the private sector at the moment – should increase collaboration and analytical thinking.

A-Space’s launch is a great opportunity for the internal communications of the government to get a much needed upgrade. And I’m all for the US Government taking advantage of great ideas for social networking. I just want them to share with the rest of us. I know first hand how the lack of internal tools can motivate users to take advantage of public sites or implement their own solutions. I would love to make a resource like A-Space available to my users. Currently we are using an internal Wiki and an IM and IRC server and while these tools have served us well they are limited in scope. I can imagine how a locally hosted service with the above listed features could offer a great opportunity for increased collaboration, especially across different teams and business divisions.

More importantly than the affect that this could have on my own company, I think about all the other small and medium sized companies who could really benefit from an A-Space. Having a centralized, easy to deploy, managed social network that lives within the corporate firewall could quickly open communication channels and build the relationships that most of the actual work at companies is based on. It is the implementation of tools like these that give us IT professionals an opportunity to have a substantial and lasing impact on not only the company but the effectiveness of individual employees.

There are, of course, several commercial options including from tech giants Microsoft and IBM. These solutions are usually best suited for companies that have existing installations that already use these company’s technologies. There are also open source projects working in this direction but they don’t seem to be as feature complete and robust as A-Space sounds.

This leads to the ongoing discussion of open source and government. If the taxpayer’s money was used to create software, the argument goes, then the taxpayers should benefit from that investment. I think the reuse by other departments and the release from vendor lock-in are better reasons for government projects to be created under an open source license. I understand the government’s desire to keep some things out of the public eye and under raps. I know that many security related projects wouldn’t be open sourced for fear of someone finding an exploitable bug. Yet I think that A-Space is a perfect example of the kind of government project that should be open and available to the general public. The value in this system is the content, personal connections it allows, and it’s internal access controls not the code of the system itself. The government could benefit greatly from any outside development done by the open source community that would develop around such a product. I understand that any community code would be meticulously reviewed before use inside any government network. But this code review would still cost less, in developer time, than developing the same features from scratch.

So just as President-Elect Obama has embraced Creative Commons for the Change.gov site, I hope that A-Space is released as an open source project so that others can benefit from and contribute to this resource. In the absence of this unlikely event, I hope that the open source community takes this as an opportunity to step up and create the missing A-Space for me and everyone else.