Change is hard.

That statement should not come as a shock to anyone who has ever worked anywhere in the business world, or even just lived on planet earth for that matter. However, change is a critical element to moving the collective knowledge of our species forward. Without change, we wouldn't be walking upright, let alone using a netbook to write blog posts from 35,000 feet in the air (yes, I'm composing this missive from seat 8F on Virgin America flight 84 to Washington, DC).

One of the ways many organizations try to deal with change is by bringing in new 'tools'. I work for a company whose primary 'product' is just such a tool (CollabNet TeamForge), but we also offer consulting services around Community Management, Agile development, and process change.

I may be biased here (since I'm in the services group), but I'd argue that the services offerings are the most critical component to the successful deployment of our product. One of the main reasons for this is that it's often easier for an 'outsider' to help companies, or, in my case, government agencies, shift their processes from slow, antiquated, heavyweight affairs to streamlined, agile, community-based approaches that take maximum advantage of the tools. We also provide a critical eye toward making sure that the change-phobic people involved in the transition don't try the 'new wine in old wineskins' trick.

Any historical or biblical scholar can recount the parable of putting new wine into old wineskins, but the short version is that putting new wine (tools) into old wineskins (processes) is a recipe for disaster/bursting, because the old processes are inflexible, brittle, and unstretchy (kudos to CollabNet CTO Jack Repenning for this correction of my original thought process). This is especially true if the transition effort is driven by a top-down edict that ignores the needs of the community. My community management colleague on the Forge.mil project, retired Army Lt. Colonel Susan Grosenheider, calls this the 'mandatory fun' approach, and she has first-hand knowledge of how well that goes over in the Army (hint: not well). At the end of the day, if you've deployed a new tool, but still have your broken processes wrapped in a shiny new package, you have a situation that my CollabNet colleague Drew Showers calls 'A fool with a tool is just a fast fool.'

One of the most rewarding, yet challenging jobs that Community Managers face is walking the fine line between the needs and desires of the business community, and the needs of the developers and/or users. There are times when you have to say no to one group or the other, but having someone who can step into the breach between different members of the community is extremely important to the success of any tools deployment, and pays off in the long run.

While businesses should strive to build up their own community 'champions', having a consultant who isn't tainted by the existing process makes it easier to find a way forward that isn't just 'change for the sake of change'. A good consultant also helps you avoid a culture of 'mandatory fun' which helps prevent the process 'bursting' problem, and ultimately leads to a better return on investment for the tool set you're deploying to help streamline your business or development process.

By Bill Portelli, CollabNet CEO & President

I am proud to be sitting here in Frankfurt making my way to Davos, Switzerland, where I will accept a Technology Pioneer Award. While there, I will also participate in a number of working sessions and breakout groups along with hundreds of technical, business, and social leaders from around the globe.  Although I will have the pleasure of accepting this award and participating in these sessions, I accept this on behalf of the hard work, passion, and vision of the current and past employees of CollabNet who have made globally distributed software development a reality. The community of World Economic Forum (WEF) Technical Pioneers was established by the WEF in 2000 in recognition of the importance of small companies that create impact through technical innovation of entire industries.  Since 2000, a rigorous annual selection process by the WEF in cooperation with a host of strategic partners identifies hundreds of companies worldwide, and eventually selects about two dozen companies each year. 

When thinking about why CollabNet won this award, a couple of things struck me.  First, it takes a certain kind of company to win.  Klaus Schwab, founder and still the driving force behind the WEF, founded it in 1971, based on the stakeholder theory, which states that the management of an enterprise has to serve all stakeholders.  In a 2008 London Times opinion piece, he wrote:  “ . . . the management has to lead the enterprise as the trustee of all stakeholders . . . in order to secure the long term prosperity of the company”.  By “stakeholder”, Schwab means all constituencies – both internal and external.  I’d like to believe that CollabNet management has operated in an open manner with this long-term view of serving our stakeholders since we founded the company in 1999 - both internally among our employees, as well as externally with our clients and business partners.   And of course, we need to look no further than CollabNet’s founding of Subversion and continued corporate sponsorship and leadership of it over the last 10 years to see that this multi-stakeholder long term view of the world is a core value of our company.  Perhaps it’s the open source gene coming through….

The second aspect that struck me even more was that the companies honored as Pioneers are recognized for creating “impact through technical innovation of entire industries.”  CollabNet, and our nearly 1,000 customers, have blazed the path for industry to define and adopt industry-changing software development paradigms -- from fractured and decentralized to collaborative and distributed.  We have done this across every industry, and often with award-winning results, such as the recent recognition by the US government for DISA’s CollabNet-based implementation of forge.mil.  Certainly, great technology is critical to winning such an award. Even more important is the ability to have the long-term vision and perseverance to identify an industry opportunity, and to work within that industry to bring to bear that technology for transformative gains for all that participate in that industry.  That’s exactly what CollabNet, DISA, and other companies have done in the past year - but more about that in a blog to come.

About the Author

(Posted by Dana Nourie)

The lack of access to source code and clear government usage rights have been major impediments undermining DoD wide software reuse initiatives.  Simply stated, no source code, no reuse.  In my view, the new guidance can be seen as an initial step in DoD acquisition reform that could enable large amounts of software to be shared and reused across the DoD.  The reuse and sharing of software is already enabled by the collaborative software development environment at Forge.mil, as operated by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).  Policies that increase the government's access to source code can only help to foster the success of such initiatives.

As tax payers, any policy that effectively enables software reuse, regardless of whether it is developed under open source license or not, should be received as a positive step.  The net result might be that the DoD actually stops paying and repaying for the same software to be developed over again.

It has been quite a while since I've blogged specifically about Forge.mil and what we've been up to as a team. My silence here in the blog has nothing to do with a lack of things to talk about - it's actually quite the opposite. There's been a ton of work going on, and some interesting achievements/recognition given to the project team. I'll summarize below & share some pictorial highlights as well.

Achievements

• Information Week 500 - 'Government Innovators Award'
• Government Computer News Honorable Mention for 'Great dot-gov Web Sites 2009'
• Featured Article in 'Whose Who in DISA'

Progress

• Multiple outreach presentation efforts, including Potomac Gov 2.0 Summit and GOSCON
• Software.forge.mil migrated to DoD production data center
• Project.forge.mil system operational in production data center (still sorting out costing models)
• Initial integration planning/prototyping for certification.forge.mil

While these four bullets may not look like much, they've monopolized the majority of the team's time in terms of paperwork, accreditations, and working with the many other teams involved to get us to this point. A lot of good and hard work went on, and we are excited to see some of the additional capabilities starting to take shape.

Future Directions/What's Next

One of the things I want to reiterate (after hearing some comments at GOSCON that indicated a lack of understanding) is that unlike a lot of other systems in DoD, Forge.mil is not static - what it is today is not what it will be in the future. I heard several people say they couldn't see how forge.mil could be used because it doesn't have 'feature x'. My response: "Put in a request for feature X - the requirements aren't locked down in cement". This resulted in a confused look: "You mean the requirements weren't set months ago?" No, and that is an important piece of what we are trying to accomplish with ALL of the Forge.mil capabilities - an agility of development, test, certification, and deployment that let's the DoD field systems in a much more efficient fashion.

If you ask the Forge.mil project director what our executive sponsor (General Cartwright, Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff) thinks is the most important aspect of Forge.mil, he'll tell you that it isn't delivering new tools just for the sake of wrapping up bad processes in new skins. General Cartwright wants to see Forge.mil push the edge of the comfort zone with regard to how software and systems development is currently done in the DoD. Our team at CollabNet is working hard to assist in making this a reality.

There are some exciting things the entire team is going to be working on here in Reston, VA for the next 2 1/2 days as we plan for Release 5 - tentatively scheduled for full rollout at the 2010 DISA partner conference in May 2010 - our overall theme is most likely going to be 'DoD Agile', and it will have to encompass both new features and cultural changes.

It should be an exciting and rewarding ride for the next few months - stay tuned for more details...

With 'Government 2.0' receiving a disproportionate amount of coverage in the press lately (due in part to the new administration's focus on transparency - a good thing in my opinion), there have been a number of pundits who have asked, 'When will we know that we've reached Government 2.0, and how long is that going to take?'

I think that begs the question of exactly what constitutes Government 2.0, as well as sets an unrealistic expectation of a finite process that has a clear beginning and end. Clearly, any effort designed to fundamentally change within the Government such things as technology acquisition, transparency, or collaboration will not be a 'forklift revolution,' but an ongoing and constantly reviewed process. I think most intelligent and knowledgeable folks within government realize that successive approximations are the only realistic way to make this happen.

There has been good progress on some of these fronts (both for internal government & public collaboration) - notably data.gov, Intellipedia, A-Space, whitehouse.gov, and even Forge.mil. However, one of the recent approximations that I believe is critical to this effort has happened within the Department of Defense - a call to streamline the acquisition process for Information Technology. Currently, the IT acquisition process is the same one used for things like tanks and missiles, systems that require a large up-front investment in requirements analysis and a strict process to ensure they can perform the necessary mission before the 'crank is turned' and thousands of items are produced and delivered.

Software, as most of us know, doesn't operate that way, and in fact, needs to be able to adapt to changing technologies and requirements throughout the life cycle of deployed systems. The DoD will be fielding 10 systems in fiscal 2010 to be acquired under the new, more streamlined process, and if these are successful, there is a strong chance that the program could be expanded to add more systems in the future.

I should also note that there need to be approximations within approximations. I know this sounds silly, but the best example I can think of is cultural change in how IT and other software support systems are developed and fielded. A large change in the culture that we are attempting to engender with the Forge.mil effort is shared (and in many cases, 'open' within the DoD) collaboration. There are approximations within this cultural change effort aimed at getting people used to not developing in silos, looking for, and building reusable components, and accepting contributions from qualified members of the department outside of their immediate project team.

Once I fully realized the need for these approximations in my efforts as one of the Forge.mil community managers, it was easier to relax and treat this entire effort as a continuous process, not as a finite deliverable. I believe it is critical that the larger government community adopt this same approach as well - attempting to build out all parts of what Government 2.0 could or should be right away would be expensive, and doomed to a lackluster reception by those in the community who need it most. The new DoD acquisition plan seems to correctly recognize a need for 'course corrections' or 'approximations' as we move forward toward building a more participative technology infrastructure for government. I'm hopeful that it will become the model for other government agencies going forward - quite honestly, doing it any other way probably portends failure from both the technology and fiscal perspective.

As I thought about the title for this post, I realized I'd be taking my chances with it from a hype and buzzword perspective. If there were ever two concepts that are emblematic of where we are today in technology, it would have to be 'Community' and 'Government 2.0'.

Unfortunately, they are also two of the most overused and over-hyped phrases in our technology lexicon. However, given what I attempt to do everyday in my role as Forge.mil's community manager, I'm hoping I can cut through some of the hype and bring some practical ideas to this space. This is also an opportune time for me to get some of these thoughts down here, as I'm planning on giving a new, more community-focused presentation on Forge.mil to the folks at the Online Community 'Unconference' being hosted by ForumeOne Networks on June 10th, 2009 in Mountain View, CA.

Because of my engineering background, I love reuse, so, I've titled the talk 'Generals, Colonels & Community - Refactoring DoD Software Development'. Some readers of this blog will recognize the first part of that title from a previous post of mine on this subject. So, without giving away all of my presentation (I'd love to have folks come see it in person!), here is some of what I'll be covering from the 'What Have We Learned about Gov 2.0 Communities?' perspective:

• They are more risk averse than their corporate counterparts
• They're addicted to email - if the community platform doesn't reach into email, you're in trouble
• They require slightly more 'Stick' (top-down pressure) than 'Carrot' (grassroots)
• They tend to grow around efforts to extend tools (SharePoint, Lotus Domino, Red Hat Enterprise Linux), rather than their own technology
• They require more of a 'contact-sport' approach - face time and one-on-one explanations

The good news I've found in the short time I've been working in this space is that there are pockets of somewhat frustrated, but extremely passionate Open Source/Open Collaboration champions in this world. Those are the people that keep the momentum going, and as a community manager, you have to give them as much care and feeding as you can, since they are paddling upstream against a very strong cultural current.

I'll do a post-conference write up on what I learn from giving this talk, as I plan to utilize the cadre of community-minded folks in attendance as a sounding board to help me improve it. I hope to see some of you at the event - it should be a productive day listening and learning from some of the best community management minds in the field!

WOW! That's about all I can say about the experience I just went through at the DISA Partner Conference last week in Anaheim, CA. The Orange County city is known primarily for its local attractions (e.g. - Disneyland), but the biggest excitement I saw last week was the official unveiling of the Forge.mil system. Last week's conference was the culmination of a LOT of work by a geographically dispersed 'community' (more on that a little later), and it really did come off without a hitch.

I'd like to start off with my personal highlight of the conference - briefing Lt. General Pollett (DISA Director) in our booth at the show. As you can see from the picture below, he was extremely engaged while receiving this briefing, and he asked some great follow-up questions to cement his understanding of our mission and vision for the site:

In addition to General Pollett, we briefed several other senior leaders, including Colonel Bethea (DISA Chief of Staff), as well as many others who came by the Forge.mil booth to hear what all of the buzz was about. A lot of that was generated by mention of the system in keynote addresses, and the very focused and targeted public relations and outreach that the CollabNet and DISA teams did prior to the show - of course, the commemorative Forge.mil lanyard giveaway probably didn't hurt either. :) Suffice it to say, the booth was steadily busy during the whole show - so busy at times that we had to have people come back later, as all of the team personnel were often times completely tied up with walking folks through a demo of the site, or talking about key strategic points of the system (and even getting people to sign up!). The best part of booth duty (aside from briefing the seniors) was to hear other booth personnel from around DoD comment that we seemed to have not only the biggest buzz, but also the most effectively targeted message for the show. I know that I speak for the team when I say that was extremely gratifying to hear.

I did attend a couple of the excellent keynotes (including General Pollett and Lt. General Allen from the USMC), but a large portion of my time outside of the booth was spent in preparing for, and speaking at, the Forge.mil track sessions. Those sessions happened on Wednesday, and included Rob Vietmeyer (Forge.mil Project Director) with a recap/introduction of the platform, a panel discussion with Rob, myself, Aaron Lippold (internal DISA Forge.mil Community Manager), and Gary Welch from the OPTICKS open source project. There was also an excellent session covering a demo of a USAF test harness initiative that has integrated their system within SoftwareForge.mil. It was a great example to showcase how the CollabNet TeamForge platform enables Round-Trip Engineering.

The panel session had some pre-planned questions which gave the panel members a chance to expound on information from Rob's session, as well as cover topics such as Open Source development methodology, community building, and cultural hurdles that are present when trying to move any organization (especially a military one) into a more collaborative development effort. After the pre-planned questions were over, we opened it up to the audience, and answered several good questions on how to get started with the system, what the future holds, and how we plan to fight some of the 'antibodies' that tend to come up in large organizations. However, my favorite comment from the audience was a user who proclaimed 'First off, on behalf of the US taxpayers, you guys ROCK!' As a community manager, there is really no higher praise you can hope for - being able to provide a system and community that engenders such enthusiasm is pretty much why you do this job.

Personally, the other reason I do this job is because every once in a while, you get to work with a really outstanding group of people. I know I've made this point in previous blog posts, but I was really struck this past week with what a great example/parallel the Forge.mil team is to what we are trying to enable in the DoD community. This is a group of geographically-dispersed individuals (California, DC, Charleston) with varying specialities and backgrounds, that came together to form not only a team, but a true community, where input is accepted and expected, and project direction is driven from consensus. This occurred to me while we were all sitting at an Anaheim Angels game after the last day of booth duty, taking a much needed rest from the excitement and work of the show. Sitting with my colleagues, whom I've only known about 4 months, seemed as natural as if I'd known them all my life. The bonds that have been formed among the team are strong, and the personal relationships represented in that community are a key ingredient in the current and future success of Forge.mil. Experiencing this reminded me again why building a community around software development efforts is very powerful - this stuff is complex and challenging, and if you can harness the talent and energy of the right cross-section of people, you can do some pretty amazing things.

Finally, I'll leave you with some of the great press coverage that came out of last week's event - needless to say, there was awesome work done by both the CollabNet and DISA marketing/PR teams to enable this. Here is a sampling of the articles/blog posts/Twitter streams:

• Forge.mil Twitter Stream
• CollabNet Powers Forge.mil Launch
• Forge.mil - Key Part of DISA's Net-Centric Strategy
• Forge.mil Update and DISA Hacks Public Domain

All in all, this was an extremely successful show and launch, and I'm happy to have been a part of it - more updates to come as we continue launching new capabilities within Forge.mil this year. Stay tuned....

As I sit here in the offices of CollabNet on a Friday evening, wrapping up final tasks before heading to Anaheim next week for the DISA Partner Conference, I'm heartened by news that we received about an hour ago. The Forge.mil system has officially been granted IOC (Initial Operational Capability) status by DISA. This may not mean much to some of you reading this, but suffice it to say it is a huge step forward in fielding a set of collaborative environments to improve software development at the US Department of Defense.

We now are 'officially open for business' (with the initial 'SoftwareForge.mil' offering). This does not mean that the work is over however - it is only just beginning. We expect that after (or probably even during) the conference next week, we'll be getting a deluge of new users and project requests on SoftwareForge.mil. Additionally, we know there is pent-up demand for the ProjectForge.mil capability (the same toolset as SoftwareForge.mil, but specifically designed to allow private collaborative projects within DoD).

When we started development of what has become our IOC launch back in October of last year, I don't think any of us truly realized the huge interest we would be generating with this effort. As we prepare to present the Forge.mil story at the conference, including a panel session I'll be a part of, I'd like to thank our colleagues at DISA & Navy SPAWAR for guiding us through the complex process of launching the site while keeping an open mind to a new way of doing things. I know I've learned a ton about how software development in the government works, and I hope we've been able to bring a unique perspective on how Open Source collaborative projects can work in such an environment.

For those that may just be joining this blog thread on my Forge.mil updates, feel free to check out the slides and video replay of the 'Introduction to Forge.mil' webinar we did several weeks ago. It should give you a good overall feel for where we are trying to take this effort. We also welcome your comments, questions, and feedback on that direction as well.

And with that, I'm going to head off to pack, and hope to see some of you at the show. Oh, and yes, I'll be sneaking in some 'Mickey Time' at Disneyland the weekend after the conference... I couldn't go all the way down there and not pop in to see my favorite mouse and his cohorts!

I'll be tweeting from the show as well (you can follow me @guyma on Twitter), and will have a wrap-up blog post when I get back. I'll see the rest of you in a couple of weeks...

I'm on my way back to the San Francisco Bay Area from my trip to our nation's capital for both the 'Introduction to Forge.mil' webinar, as well as Government 2.0 Camp, a 'barcamp-style' 'unconference' focusing on collaboration and social media in the government sector. Side note - WiFi on Virgin America is completely awesome! Of course, the temptation is to always work instead of sleeping, but I know I've been more productive in the travel time on this trip than ever before!

So, first, let's cover the webinar - not only was I in town to speak during the event with Rob Vietmeyer (DISA's Forge.mil Project Director), but it was also a chance to physically meet other members of the DISA team and discuss things we'll need to do as we move toward the official launch of Forge.mil in mid-April. I'm happy to say that the webinar went off very smoothly (with the possible exception of trying to find a working VOIP-enabled headset to use on one of the computers at the DISA facility). The slides had come together nicely through several iterations, and the presentation handoff between myself and Rob went smoothly. There were a TON of good questions after the webinar, including everything from how to get started, to licensing and acquisition policy thoughts. Best of all, I didn't feel like I tripped over my tongue too much. :) The recording isn't quite ready to put up yet - but we do have slides available. We were very pleased to have 277 registrants and 162 attendees, which gave us a 58% attendance rate (I'm told anything over 50% is excellent).

The afternoon after the webinar was supposed to be a chance to work with Rob and his team. I did meet several team members, but unfortunately, Rob was called away to give a review/briefing to senior DISA leadership about the project progress. The good news about this was that the review went extremely well, and General Pollett (DISA Director) was very excited, and has asked for additional demos at future reviews!

After the webinar, I was prepared to just 'relax, listen and learn' at the Government 2.0 Camp conference the next day. Oh, how little did I know. ;) Not having ever been part of a 'barcamp' conference, I was a bit skeptical of the 'planned on the fly' agenda concept. The first morning started with the entire auditorium at the Duke Ellington School for The Arts introducing themselves and being given 3 words to describe their interests, or 10 words to propose a session. I used 'developer, collaboration, community' as my three tags and didn't propose any sessions.

My colleague Kevin Hourihane and I then decided to attend the morning session on 'A-Space' (best described as 'Facebook for Spies'). It was an interesting discussion, but at the end of the Q & A period, Gunnar Hellekson from Red Hat asked the presenter if the development system for A-Space would eventually be tied to Forge.mil. Needless to say, that caught our attention, and the ensuing 15 minute conversation brought a lot of questions about our system. In true barcamp fashion, someone asked if we were going to present on Forge.mil. Since I had my copy of the webinar slides, I agreed, and set up a time on day 2 to talk about it.

Despite the fact my session was up against the White House media team's talk (including Macon Phillips), there were about 10 folks who showed up to hear me give a condensed version of the webinar talk. I loved that this was very interactive (the webinar format makes it a little more difficult to interact, since you are doing it strictly via text chat), and I got several really good questions, especially around the acquisition process for software, and how adding government contractors into the mix of SoftwareForge.mil could prove cumbersome, especially in light of time and materials contracts that most software projects use. One contractor mentioned that his company would be thrilled to have more time on a contract to do more testing, or do a more complete engineering job (assuming they found a component on software.forge.mil to re-use for part of their project). However, that was not universally accepted by the other contractors in the room. This cultural issue is one that is going to have to be solved for effective re-use within major projects that the DoD bids out to contractors. The good news is that I came away from the session much more aware of some of the hurdles we'll face in building out the community with DoD contractors in the mix.

There were several interesting sessions I took part in during the conference, and I'd like to highlight two:

• What's the Big Deal?
• Building an Open Source/Federal collaboration (i.e. - 'Forge.gov')

The first one dealt with how governments could deal with outward-facing social media tools, and what policies they should have in place to deal with 'bad' content. I liked this session because it was a group of community managers (even if some didn't have the title), who realized that allowing social media in government (and even corporate) spaces is not a big deal if you have some sane procedures in place to deal with the occasional unprofessional comment/content. This echos what I've posted about in the past - you have to trust your interview process to hire people who are professionals that know how to properly utilize social media tools.

The second session above took place when the 'techies' got together to talk about Open Source Community and Federal collaboration, and these were extremely interesting, and quite informative. In a nutshell, the techies in the room wanted to know when (or if) a 'Forge.gov' site could be stood up to allow collaboration between the Federal (non-DoD) space and the greater Open Source world. I know that there are some discussions about this very thing going on between several companies (can't say more just yet), so I hope it comes to fruition. The main thing I cautioned the people assembled about was understanding that culture would have to shift to get the Federal IT folks (especially project managers) to embrace such an effort, especially around things like acquisition policy and information assurance (IA).

One final technical note on the conference - this was the first event I've been to in the 'Twitter Age'. There was a lot of live blogging going on, but far and away Twitter was the primary means of putting out information, links, thoughts & notes on the proceedings. Since Twitter 'streams' are preserved after an event is over, and time stamped, it makes it very easy to go back and view what happened during the event. Here are some 'streams' you can check out if you are interested:

• All Gov20Camp Tweets (LOTS of content)
• My Gov20Camp Tweets
• Forge.mil Gov20Camp Session Tweets

All in all, it was a very successful trip - now, if I could just get Virgin America to fly everywhere else I might need to travel, life would be perfect... :)

The Forge.mil team is very excited about the progress we've made in a short time (about two months of 'Beta' availability), and we are working toward our launch window of early April (prior to the DISA partner conference in Anaheim CA on 20 April 2009). The first of our five community properties (software.forge.mil) is online, with nearly 1000 registered users, and close to 40 hosted projects.

We've received a lot of questions and requests for more information about what Forge.mil is (and isn't), so, we've decided to put together a 'webinar' on 26 March 2009 at 1100 EDT. The webinar is titled (not surprisingly), 'Introduction to Forge.mil'. It is a free registration to listen in, and we hope we'll get a lot of folks to attend, and then hopefully disseminate the information we cover. Briefly, we are going to touch on:

• Vision, goals, objectives of Forge.mil's five communities of interest
• Benefits of participation
• How to participate
• The platform technology behind Forge.mil
• Capabilities and Timeline for new features
• Experiences/success stories from teams participating in the Beta period

Please feel free to pass this along to anyone interested in listening in - we look forward to some good questions during the Q&A session afterward.