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ExecutiveBiz: What is your role at NGA?
Chris Rasmussen:
My paycheck comes from NGA but I’m an “intelligence community man” not an “agency man “per se. It’s not about your agency in this new web 2.0 context; it’s more about the community and what knowledge you can bring to the issues and questions at hand. Where you sit doesn’t necessarily determine where you stand in this new collaborative environment.
However, my role at NGA is knowledge management with social software. My job is to promote and train users throughout the community, not just NGA, on the advantages of working topically in agency-neutral platform not channel collaborative space.
I founded NGA Social Software 101 in April 2007 and it has been a run-away success. Since April, a group of NGA and non-NGA instructors have trained over 250 students on Intellipedia (wiki), tag|connect (social bookmarking), blogging, picture-sharing services, etc. More importantly, we talk to students about why working in “platform” space is more advantageous than working in isolated “channels.” An analogy I use in the class is about going to New York to see the play “Phantom of the Opera.” Let’s say you drive to New York to see this play, but your seats were perpendicular to the stage and the play took place inside a tube. The only people who could see the play were the small group sitting across the lip of the tube. This tube or channel practice is what we typically do in the IC when we rely solely on email, shared folders behind firewall, and intranets--it limits the base of talent you can summon to work issues. When we remove the tube, we are on a platform or stage that everyone can see. Intellipedia, tag|connect, blogs, etc. in Intelink-space are on a stage that everyone can see not limited by the angle of vision inside a tube. “NGA Social Software 101” is administered by NGA, but I and other NGA and non-NGA instructors have traveled the country and conducted many non-NGA iterations of the course at other intelligence agencies, military units, and law enforcement agencies. The course is community focused, so adaption to non-NGA users is easy.
ExecutiveBiz: What is your definition of Web 2.0?
Chris Rasmussen:
Web 2.0 is not about how webmasters or catalogers define your content viewing, generation, or mashup experience. In Web 2.0, you define how content is delivered and mashed up. In many cases, you are also generating the content. You do not solely rely on webmasters to provide “one-stop shopping.” Web 2.0 is helping the intelligence community move away from passive consumption to active consumption. Instead of sitting back and viewing “agency monologues,” users can now post blog replies, tag the content, rate it’s utility, and “vote on it” by making the source a link in the meta-discussion about that topic in Intellipedia.
ExecutiveBiz: What is the future of Web 2.0 in Government space?
Chris Rasmussen:
It’s here to stay. Intellipedia has over 37,000 users, users have used tag|connet to socially bookmark hundreds of thousands of urls, and blog posts leave the default main page in about a half hour, so it’s highly unlikely these services will be cut off or reversed. They are only going to grow faster and engrain themselves into the business process deeper. These tools have helped me works so efficiently that I could never go back to the “old way” of email, webmaster-only postings, and channels.
ExecutiveBiz: What hot trends are you tracking?
Chris Rasmussen:
I’m tracking the developments of the “semantic web.” However, RDF triples and ontologies have huge limits in the context of pre-defined relationships and categories akin to Web 1.0. Web 2.0 folksonomoies are not multi-layered, can be fuzzy and repetitive, but they do a “good enough” job linking and organizing data.
ExecutiveBiz: What is something most people don’t know about you?
Chris Rasmussen:
I’m not a “tech guy.” Most people think that I’m a computer science and video-game playing nerd. Actually, by background, I’m a social scientist. My BA is in history, with an emphasis on Asia, and my master’s is in National Security Studies. I became a “tech guy” at work (self –taught) because of all this “computer stuff” in the content of national security is so vitally important to the success of the Intelligence Community.
For more information about
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, visit
www.nga.mil/portal/site/nga01/.
Interview with Chris Rasmussen conducted by JD Kathuria.
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