When Intelligence Officers Get Social…

Today (and on-and-off this week) I’m attending the Intelligence Community’s “Enterprise 2.0: WIRE and ICES Conference,” up at the Kossiakoff Center at JHU/APL in Maryland, with its focus this year on social software and social networking – not the same thing, of course.

Acronym explanation, with some new ones tossed in:

WIRE = CIA’s World Intelligence Review, a very nifty Web 2.0-style classified news site now available on JWICS and SIPRNET.

ICES = Intelligence Community’s Enterprise Services group. 

And of course, JHU/APL = Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab.

The kickoff speaker is Rich Russell, Deputy Associate Director of National Intelligence and head of ICES, on the theme of how the community working together can meet “the challenges of the entire community into the future.”  Rich and I have known each other for a while; his Alabama accent exceeds my own slight Carolina lilt, and even approaches the deep-woods drawl of his fellow-Alabamian, Microsoft’s Jim Simon.  Before the conference got going this morning Rich and I had an interesting conversation about the current personnel changes underway in the IC during this run-up to an administration change in January.

As befits a “2.0” conference, you can follow along even if you’re not at APL:

• The conference’s own Twitter feed is: http://twitter.com/wireices, and I notice that several participants in the room are contemporaneously tweeting, so check http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23wireices periodically if you like. 
• Even better, the speakers are being streamed live at UStream, found here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/wireices-conference-2008 (please excuse the quality – hey, it’s streaming!).
• Most impressive of all is the conference’s own social-networking site, at http://ice.nowgetsocial.com, a useful aggregation of several social tools and feeds. Many of the participants are using it, though presumably only those who don’t mind having their online profiles and “real” identities shared….

Below is the agenda for the conference, an interesting line-up:

Day 1 – Sep 8 – Our Current Reality
0900 – 0915, Opening & Overview by Amy Senger
0915 – 0945, Welcome by Geoff Fowler & Rich Russell
0945 – 1045, The Global Information Grid by Brig Gen Michael Basla

                   (Vice Director, C4 Systems, Joint Staff, Pentagon)
1100 – 1150, Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee (Harvard Business School)
1300 – 1400, Washington DC’s Innovations by Vivek Kundra (CIO of Washington DC)
1400 – 1500, Lessons Learned in Web 2.0
1515 – 1630, Focused Synergy Keynote by Robert Van Arlen

Day 2 – Sep 9 – Over the Horizon (1 year out)
0900 – 0910, Overview of the Day by John Hale
0910 – 0950, How to Survive Web 1.5 by Fred Hassani
1010 – 1120, Demo of New Tools for the IC
1120 – 1200, World of Web 2.0 Panel Discussion moderated by Andrea Baker
1310 – 1350, Secure Search by Chris Johnson and Dave Lemen
1350 – 1440, Utility of Web 2.0 Panel Discussion moderated by Steven Mandzik
1500 – 1530, Information Sharing Data Standards, Policy, and Compliance by David Martin-McCormick
1530 – 1630, The Future of Web 2.0 Keynote by David Weinberger

Day 3 – Sep 10 – Thoughts on the Future
0900 – 0930, Vision 2015 by Andy Vail
0930 – 1015, Collegial Debate between Geoff Fowler & Chris Rasmussen moderated by Carmen Medina
1030 – 1130, Community Discussion on the Way Forward (Breakouts)
1130 – 1215, Summary Presentation by Sean Dennehy & Don Burke
1215- 1230, Results of Way Forward discussion (Geoff Fowler & Richard Russell)     

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