DCGS Worldwide Conference 2009 is next week

US Joint Forces Command is sponsoring next week’s third annual DCGS Worldwide Conference in Virginia Beach, and I’m looking forward to participating on a great panel. If you don’t know much about the world of the “Distributed Common Ground/Surface System,” you can find some slightly dated background information at http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/systems/dcgs.htm. DCGS is in many ways all about ISR, or intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance – as well as their integration throughout the defense intelligence enterprise through the network of JIOCs (Joint Intelligence Operations Centers) and elsewhere.

 

There aren’t a lot of unclassified guides to the DCGS and ISR world for me to point to out on the web as background, although an anti-war group has posted a draft version of Army Intelligence Field Manual  (FM) 2-01, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, which you can read in html format here.

 

For up-to-date information, why not register at the conference website and attend?

 

The conference’s overall goal is “bringing together program offices, developers, and users to focus on establishing a fully integrated and seamless Enterprise in support of the warfighter.” Quoting more specifically from the conference material, “The conference objectives are to:

• Improve knowledge of DCGS and JIOC capabilities for security, engagement and relief and reconstruction activities
• Increase the utility and value DCGS provides to Irregular Warfare and General Purpose Forces operating independently, and through increasingly lower echelons
• Markedly improve the ability to integrate with U.S. agencies, coalition forces, and other partners across the ISR enterprise
• Inspire new thinking in areas of acquisition of ISR services, DCGS capability metrics, and the rapid delivery of intelligence solutions to the warfighter.”

 

The panel I’m participating on is titled “Amplifying ISR: Bringing Proven Advanced Video Processing Technologies to the Warfighter Now,” led by my good friend John Marshall. Below is the line up of the panel, which will focus primarily on the key topic of how to exploit and manage the waves of information coming off the profusion of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s) around the world.

Moderator: Mr. John A. Marshall
Chief Technology Officer

Joint Transformation Command – Intelligence

United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM)

 

Panel Members:

Ms. Michelle Munson
President and Co-Founder, Aspera, Inc.

Mr. Lewis Shepherd
Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Institute 

Panel Members:

Mr. Robert Gourley
CTO, Crucial Point

Mr. Rudi Ernst
CEO/CTO, Pixia Corporation


Ms. Casey Henson
DIA/DS-CTO

Dr. Kari Kelton, Ph.D.
Chief System Sciences Officer, NSI, Inc.

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A Face in the Crowd

GovFresh is a great new web service which aggregates live feeds of official news from U.S. Government Twitter accounts, YouTube channels, RSS feeds, Facebook pages, Flickr photostreams and more, all in one place. It is one of a new class of interactive Government 2.0 services, portals, and tools – many of them just launching in 2009 – which have the potential of revolutionizing the way citizens get and share information about their government.  (I mention several others below.)

At a time when the Iranian people are battling to keep their access open to Twitter, Facebook, and even phone lines in order to mobilize their anti-dictatorial protests, it is heartening that individuals in the United States and many other corners of the world find their governments increasingly willing to share information widely.

Luke Fretwell is GovFresh’s founder, and he’s becoming a welcome new voice in the debates around government technology policy. Luke recently wrote a blog post arguing “Why Gov 2.0 means the U.S. Government must centralize its Web operations.” A heated debate arose in the comments, including my own strenuous disagreement, and yet I became a fast admirer of Luke, his entrepreneurial energy, and the site’s information value.

GovFresh has been running a great series of profile-interviews in its blog section of leading individuals in the “Gov 2.0” movement, and today I was the chosen subject. The article has the unfortunately exaggerated title (in my case): “Gov 2.0 Hero Lewis Shepherd.”  Here’s an excerpt:

What’s the killer app that will make Gov 2.0 the norm instead of the exception?

Can’t tell you because we’re building it in the lab right now, ha! Seriously, the killer app may be something big and powerful, from an enterprise perspective, though I’d put the odds on something less obvious, but more pervasive. Here’s what I mean. I think often about the roots of the original Progressive movement at the dawn of the 20^th Century, and their advocacy of direct-vote referendums, championed by Hiram Johnson and the like. Those give the people a direct say over particular issues, but the downside is that “the people” don’t always exercise informed judgment, and popular opinion can be manipulated and swayed by malevolent interests. So I’m looking to Gov 2.0 capabilities that maintain the representative aspect (the elected official, exercising his or her judgment) while incorporating real-time, structured, unfiltered but managed visualizations of popular opinion and advice. I’m intrigued by new services along these lines like www.you2gov.com, www.govfresh.com, www.govtwit.com, and the like, but I’m also a big proponent of semantic computing – called Web 3.0 by some – and that should lead the worlds of crowdsourcing, prediction markets, and open government data movements to unfold in dramatic, previously unexpected ways. We’re working on cool stuff like that.

At the end of the full interview, I observed that “You can’t watch what’s gone on with social software use in Egypt’s Facebook Revolution, our own 2008 campaign, or Iran’s election protests, without feeling that Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson would have been prolific twitterers with awesome blogs.”

In the spirit of empowering the people, instead of lauding one person, I’d like to thank GovFresh for the Hero honor but share the title with those I have worked with in the past few years, and with everyone else around the world engaged in the Gov 2.0 movement – whether they realize that’s what they’re doing or not.

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