Open Source, Professionals, Military Content, and the Future

David Axe has an excellent contribution to Wired's Danger Room on the military struggles to leverage open source medium for networking ideas and discussion. His suggestion caught my attention.

I'm not saying that Army forums should be totally unprotected from insurgent snoopers. But they should be expanded, and loosened, to allow students, academics, journalists and, yes, even members of the general public to participate on some level. That's risky, sure, but worth it.

If you are reading this blog, according to our research of incoming hits, and we do this type of thing for a living so we have a pretty good handle who hits the blog, there is an 85% chance you fall into one of the following categories.

1. Retired/Active - Military/Government
2. Academic/Author
3. Student
4. Industry Related Professional
5. Relative of Active Navy Personal

We welcome anyone to the blog of to comment, but that is our core audience, and we list it in order regarding most common to least common. David is a smart guy, I link to his blog because I read his blog every day, and anything else he writes. He may not know as much about the Navy as he thinks he does, but he knows a hell of a lot more about the Air Force than he lets on.

The problem facing the Army, in fact facing much of new media, is that the tools are still not well developed. Lets be honest, Wikipedia is neat but I only link there when I'm talking about something for general discussion, not technical detail. It simply isn't that great of a source and isn't a popular interactive tool for discussions. Blogs, Messageboards, and many other interactive new media content driven tools fall into a similar category, credentials are mostly anonymous and too often theories get accepted as reality based on brief, incomplete professional research.

I see the concern about security as a paper tiger though, if Proceedings, the Small War Journal, NPS, NWC, and the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College can produce professional content for public dissemination, the challenge isn't a matter of security, it is a matter of leveraging the method. Of those only the Small Wars Journal has created interactive discussion, and while the tools are lacking, they have still managed to produce excellent discussions among field commanders.

SteelJaw Scribe and I have discussed the possibility of creating a Maritime Strategy blog network, perhaps a maritime security blog specifically. The problem there is getting people to contribute, and who moderates. The way I look at it, the idea only works if the moderators are unbiased, the contributors are well known and credentialed, and the naval new media community (naval centric bloggers and other naval centric sites) supports the blog. In other words, run it similar to how they run Milblogs at Mudville Gazette except pull more professional contributions than blog contributions.

Honestly, I don't expect the Navy or any other service to engage interactive open source discussion anytime soon. They will come out with too many rules to make it useful, as they already have with previous attempts, and there is too much potential to control the message for it to be effective. For now, Sailorbob will be the present and future. I still believe the answer will come from the grass roots outside the DoD, because if you observe the way insurgents and terrorists leverage the open source, that is exactly how their system developed.