The U.S. Air Force is using Web 2.0 technologies to better support its missions despite wariness about security, a civilian technology official of the service said last week.
The new techniques, including blogs, wikis and personal profiles, are coming out of an initiative by Air Force Knowledge Now (AFKN), a resource provided on the Department of Defense (DOD) intranet. They're helping service members and civilian employees find the information they need more quickly and are now being shared with members of the U.S. Army, Navy and Marines, according to Randy Adkins, director of the Air Force's Center of Excellence for Knowledge Management.
Even though the Internet itself was originally developed by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), an arm of the DOD, the military is in some ways an awkward place for emerging Web technologies. User-generated content and social networking have a freewheeling, democratic reputation at odds with the top-down character of the military. Blogs operated by service members have even come under attack as being threats to security.
But within the walled-off world of the DOD intranet, they are helping the Air Force and other services operate, Adkins told attendees at the Social Networking Conference in San Francisco last week. Air Force members can post personal profiles, write blogs and podcasts, and contribute to wikis.
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