Social Networking for Software Development
Written by Harrison Donnelly
MIT 2011 Volume:15 Issue: 3 (April)
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Social networking is coming to Forge.mil, the collaborative platform operated by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), designed to improve the ability of the Department of Defense to rapidly deliver dependable software, services and systems in support of net-centric operations and warfare.
DISA has rolled out two test versions of what it calls Community Forge in recent weeks, and plans soon to provide it to all users of the twoyear-old collaborative platform, which is bringing the open source software approach to DoD software developers.
In a recent interview, DISA Chief Technology Officer David M. Mihelcic outlined the social networking initiative: “We have leveraged the Drupal content management system to insert a social networking layer in Forge.mil, which will allow for additional and much richer collaboration between software developers, not just internal to a project, but across projects. So you’ll be able to discover what’s going on across the software development community and locate experts who are working on problems similar to yours, as well as potentially gain support and get questions answered, in much the same way that social networking is being exploited in many enterprises and by the public.”
Forge.mil current supports collaborative development, Mihelcic noted, and already enables large groups that are distributed globally to collaborate and work on a software project together. But each project is an island unto itself, and participation is limited to members of that project—even though participants in other, seemingly unrelated development projects may well have something to contribute.
“Say I have a project that is working on development of software that is used in support of explosive ordinance disposal technicians,” he said. “I also have another project that is working on, for example, development of software that supports remotely operated vehicles. Those are two very different problems, and you might say there is no reason to collaborate. But they both might use a similar software development language, such as Java. It might be important to collaborate between those two projects when questions arise on Java programming.
“Using the social networking aspect of this capability, which we call Community Forge, you can discover other people working in similar technologies, ‘friend’ them and watch the status of their projects, and go to them for help in an automated fashion. You really have a much tighter-knit community between programs, not just within a program,” Mihelcic added.
Moving forward, Mihelcic envisions the social networking capability becoming the standard entry point when users go into Forge.mil, explaining the process in reference to the dominant social networking site on the Internet. “You will enter through this community layer, much as when a user logs into Facebook and immediately enters the social networking aspect of it. Within Facebook, you might be a member of a particular group that you drill down into to accomplish some task, but you still have that crosscutting social networking layer that will be the way you communicate with developers.” Diverse Projects
The introduction of social networking comes as Forge. mil has established itself as a major force in promoting defense software collaboration. It has 9,000 registered users and nearly 500 diverse software development projects. The most active project today is the National Security Leadership Decision Support Service, which Mihelcic described as is a project from within the CTO organization that develops geospatial mash-up technology to visualize all aspects of military operations. The second most active project is a logistics modernization initiative sponsored by the Department of the Army.
One of the most popular downloads that have been developed on Forge.mil is called Community CAC, which works with the Common Access Card carried by DoD employees. “Community CAC is a collaborative approach to building software to allow that CAC to interface with other applications and services. For example, Firefox is a great open source application and one of the leading Web browsers globally. We need CAC support in Firefox, but how do we get it? So we started a project to develop that through Community CAC, and now it is available to all CAC-holding users of Firefox,” he explained.
Along with the success of the main open source program, SoftwareForge.mil, DISA is also finding a market for ProjectForge.mil, which offers similar capabilities on a reimbursable basis for development efforts that elect not to use the open source approach.
“SoftwareForge.mil is for developers in DoD who are committed to sharing their software,” Mihelcic said. “One of the prices of entry to SoftwareForge.mil is to agree that your software will be covered by one of a number of approved open source licenses that DoD has agreed to, or a DoD community source license. If it’s an open source license, your software must be freely distributable to the entire world. If it’s a DoD community source license, it needs to be distributable to anyone in DoD. That’s the only price of entry, because it is a free service on DoD networks.
“ProjectForge, on the other hand, is an approach to setting up a private copy of that software forge for a large program, which can’t license itself under either open source or community source licenses. There are DoD programs that develop software but are using a different license—basically, they can’t agree to share the software with the world or the department because of sensitivity or contractual reasons,” he explained, adding that there are currently about a dozen instantiations of ProjectForge. ♦
