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GCN Home > 12/11/06 issue

Stocking stuffers

Web 2.0 offers interactivity

By Joab Jackson and William Jackson, GCN Staff

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Web 2.0 certainly wins the buzzword of the year award, but behind the hype lies some promising technologies for government agencies. The term is shorthand for a wide and sometimes shifting range of Web technologies, including wiki (collaboration software), Ruby on Rails (rapid Web application deployment software) and Ajax (a scripting technology that makes Web pages more interactive).

In a nutshell, how these technologies make Web 2.0 different from the plain old World Wide Web we all know now is that they all can offer richer online interactions for the user, allowing you to better use agency services or even to communicate with like-minded individuals. “Web 2.0 is a decentralized mode of organizing communities of practices,” said Eric Sauve, CEO of Washington-based Tomoye Corp., which makes Web collaboration software used by the Army and other agencies.

Smart government leaders actually caught on to Web 2.0 early—before the buzzword was even coined, in fact. Last year, when the Federal CIO Council’s Architecture and Infrastructure Committee revised the Federal Enterprise Architecture Data Reference Model, it used two wikis to hash out the specification.

CIM Engineering Inc. of San Mateo, Calif., supplied the wikis through an existing contract with GSA. The CIA has already compiled about 12,000 wiki pages scattered throughout its top-secret network, said D. Calvin Andrus, the chief technology officer for the CIA’s Center for Mission Innovation. The open nature of wikis lets analyst augment and update existing material a lot more quickly. Other agencies could well find similar benefits.
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