The recent release of the Golden Phoenix After Action has caused me to do a bit of reflection on web technology and all the recent hoopla over Gov 2.0 - Golden Phoenix (GP) is a grass roots collaborative training event that started in Los Angeles in 2006. It is not an Exercise. It is a bunch of people at the tactical level coming together to train for crisis response in the Southern California Region. And we ended up getting such a positive response that what started in 2006 with a few Cops, Firemen and Marines in the LA area, has become an annual training event with a much broader base of support. You can read the After Action for all the details and some of the history over at http://civmil.org .

Civmil.org was one of the first web sites that got me into this line of work. Civmil.org was not originally created to be some social media mash-up. It started as a way to share unstructured data between civilian and military organizations who would participate in the training event. It started as a policy work-around. You see, when we started GP there was no easy way for us to share information; no place where people from all the domains could have access to post and read info. Technically very doable, but policies from every direction made it difficult to allow all these different people from different organizations with varying levels of "need to know" on the same network. So, being the "innovators" we were my buddy John turns to me and says something like, "Can't you build some kind of site where we can share this stuff?" It was a simple solution. The one network all these people could access was the internet. Now, even before John asked me that question I was thinking about the answer, but had learned to keep my mouth shut when it came to volunteering for more work. But it was clear we needed something, so I said "Yeah, we can do this."

So, I went home and created civmil.org from an Open Source framework called SiteFrame and hosted it on a shared server for about eight bucks a month. I did it as a public service as a civilian and we only had one rule - nothing classified. This was a system for sharing basic info about our training event. The military calls it non-classified information. And it worked. The site was simple and it allowed us to share info like PowerPoint presentations and Word documents that the government crowd really feels compelled to produce when planning an event. That's it. If you are waiting for me to tell you how we invented a new algorithm to magically shrink 100 boring PowerPoint slides into 10 exciting slides with each bullet mapped to a semantic vocabulary you will be disappointed.

Over the next two years it was apparent that I could not keep up with the civmil.org feature requests and still have a semblance of a life, so I started looking for a framework that had a few more out of the box features than SiteFrame. SiteFrame had been a great lightweight solution, but we really wanted to kick it up a notch and support crazy stuff like roll based permissions. I ended up choosing Drupal because it provided much of what we needed without me writing a bowl of spaghetti code to get it done. And thanks to some great contributed modules we ended up supporting many more features than roll based permissions by the time GP 2008 was over. We had actually graduated to using basic social media tools like Twitter, and doing basic data visualizations with Google Maps mash-ups. These extra features were not a requirement by any measure, but a way for us to experiment with their use in both daily communications and see if they would scale to help during execution of the training. In short, parts of the site became a functional prototype and social media demonstration for folks who typically live in email. Again, nothing fancy but I think a pretty good value considering the cost/benefit for those involved. If you want to know a bit more detail either find me at a conference and buy me a beer or you can read the After Action Appendix D.1.2

I was going to conclude this post with a list of top lessons learned but I decided that's already a matter of public record in the After Action. Instead I am going to conclude with something for the Gov 2.0 and Social Media "Experts" to ponder...

Our number one request since we started Golden Phoenix three years ago has been for someone to enable federated XMPP chat to support government cross-domain communications. That's right, that really sexy application called chat. If I had a meeting with President Obama's CIO I would ask him why we are left without the organic ability for Police, Fire, Public Health, DHS, National Guard, Military and other First Responders to have a simple chat session across organizational boundaries?