The Army and the military are complex social structures. In this Blog we will develop the idea of using social networking software tools to improve the collaboration, support, relationships, and even mission functions within the military. How can the "We" concepts and tools improve large military and government organizations? What does it mean to improve these organizations? We want to go far beyond the use of force and talk about building equipment, conducting research, supporting families, driving training, etc.
Battlefield Information Network
2/26/2008 | posted by
rdsmith
Technology Review has an excellent article describing why soldiers need social networks on the battlefield right now. The amount of information that is not disseminated or just plain lost is staggering. The hierarchical systems of the Cold War are not working in today's wars.
http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=20202
If the tools designed for the hierarchical Cold War are not working in the current war, what chance was there that they were going to work in a tradit ...
Read entire post
In my last entry I talked about pulling together a bunch of Web 2.0 tools for a specific military job. As I made lists of the tools and what they could do I had quite a jumble on my hands. So I began creating categories for them and organizing them so that they were much easier to explain to people who live in a Web 1.0 or Web 0.5 world.
I arrived at the following graphic and think it does a good job of explaining the tools in a manner that will make sense to a broad audience. I plan to us ...
Read entire post
I am working on a conference paper that explores the use of Web 2.0 technologies to support distributed training exercises that are driven by computer simulations (imagine the movie War games, but with people playing their roles). I have founda number of very useful things in teh Web 2.0 toolkit. But as I piece them together to cover all of the jobs that need to be done I am finding that many tools overlap and that there are a number of spaces that are not covered at all. Lets look at so ...
Read entire post
Every service has a library of hundreds of Field Manuals that describe the best or official method to carry out a mission or perform a prescribed activity. The Army had 542 FMs as of July 2007. These manuals are created by experts in the field in which they are written, and experts in the over all operations of the service. They are vetted by commanders and by administrators to insure that they give the best, most reliable information possible. They are one part of creating the most e ...
Read entire post
You you have finally decided to join the masses and join a social networking site. Which one do you choose? For the most part it is the same as picking your fashions, you go with the what is most popular with your friends. Most people do not choose MySpace because it is free and has tools - it is because their friends are there. How would you like to be the only person you know inside of Orkut? What is the point of being in a social network with no one you know? I use both Facebook and LinkedIn. ...
Read entire post
At first blush the Twitter micro-blogging service strikes me as a terrible idea. But after using it a little bit and thinking about implications, I can see some benefits to it. In its current form, it assumes that people are attached to a network-connected computer or cellphone most of the time. This is true for many service and office workers. But it is not true of many leaders and certainly not soldiers. Also, if a soldier has time to type into Twitter, then he is probably not doing anything i ...
Read entire post
It is actually called Analyst Space for Exploration (A-SpaceX), but I-Second Life, Intelligence Life, or Second Intel Life would be easier to understand.
SL is popular for both creating 3D content and for chumming around with virtual friends. The Intelligence community can make good use of both of these. A 3D space is a natural space in which to combine and manage information. But given a number of different sources of info, what is the best spatial tool for organizing it? Sticking photos on on ...
Read entire post
On the Internet there are two dominant ways to search for information. The first is to hit one of the search engines and let it do the walking for you. Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and a host of others will giv eyou thousands of possible matches on your search. This is great when you are looking for someone elses information - like an organization's web site. But when you want to understand a topic or a term better, this is a terrible approach to learning about it.
The second dominant way to find infor ...
Read entire post
Do Soldiers Blog? Do they take pictures of their tours? Do they drink beer? ... Of course the answer to all of these is "yes". Blogging has become a favorite form of expression for soldiers in Iraq. Below is a list of several soldier blogs and an interesting article in Wired magazine. After checking these out, lets explore some interesting questions:
Why do soldiers blog?
I am not a psychologist or a sociologist so I would welcome comments from anyone who understands these topics be ...
Read entire post
Americas Army is a computer game that was created as a recruiting tool. It is not meant to teach tactics and it is not officially a forum for real soldiers to discuss such tactics. The game is also supported by a community web site similar to this We site. The amazing thing about the site is that over 230,000 people have registered on it. As of today, the site shows the following statistics.
Total Users:
231,734
Avg. New Users (day): ...
Read entire post