Background: Living documents and life-cycle plans in the Web 2.0 Era
A large organization, especially one centered around any form of future model or business planning, will invariably have several broad-scope documents that are routinely updated and modified. These documents or master plans often encompass and direct the heart of an operation, especially when the organization is entirely focused on long-term development. Such “living documents” are routinely found as land-use and urban development general plans, asset management and life-cycle models, and requirements based mission plans for acquisition of systems.
Much time, effort, and money has been used within the last decade to keep these living documents on the crest of information technology and accessible as web-based or electronic publications. Many local and state government plans are available as PDF or downloadable documents, and federal enterprises often build elaborate web portals hosted on secure servers or local networks to allow for indexing and casual updates to content. There is unfortunately no single approach or proper model for the development of a web-based living document, and much of the decision making to proceed with new architecture is based on funds, experience with IT systems, and knowledge of the countless and rapidly expanding number of content management systems available for purchase as either commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) packages or free for use as open source software (OSS). With an absence of this knowledge or experience, an organization may come to the conclusion that they will be required to contract out for new development in order to meet their capability requirements.
Granted, sometimes there simply isn’t an easily obtained COTS or OSS solution to meet a system requirement — however, an organization should always first attempt to see if there’s a way to adopt one or more of these systems through customization and alteration. OSS software is almost always free to modify, and often times proprietary COTS software can also be built upon or customized with the permission and assistance of the owner. It is much cheaper and faster to adopt an already built 80% solution, budgeting only for the development to add the extra capability your living-document may require. Within a Federal Government enterprise, you also have the opportunity to request other organizations code or systems, assuming the US Government owns the rights. It is worth the time to review what other agencies have already built or purchased, and what content management or hosting systems are available to use either for free or through interdepartmental agreement.
An Open-Source Solution
One of the most often overlooked and fiscally elegant solutions available to an organization is a system that their employees are already extremely familiar with, use daily as a reference, but are unaware of it’s potential use for their own documents and organizational plan management. The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit entity that develops and maintains the popular encyclopedia Wikipedia. As the worlds largest and most popular reference work on the Internet today, it holds 14 million articles which expands daily through the collaborative input of scientists, educators, professional subject matter experts, and everyday users. While not disputing some of the criticism and debate behind it’s alleged flaws as a reference work and encyclopedia, the system behind this massive database is proven and widely lauded as one of the most efficient and feature rich content management systems for knowledge management and information hosting available today.
Written in beautifully optimized PHP with an SQL database to store all the content, MediaWiki is the power behind Wikipedia and an infinitely expanding number of smaller resources throughout the Internet. Many companies and small government agencies already use this free open-source software (distributed under a GNU Public License) for their own creative uses thanks to a rich community in support of developing, improving, and optimizing the code base. Countless new extensions, widgets, and modules are created and distributed every day to add new features and capabilities to the existing software.
Adopting MediaWiki within your organization is a rather trivial process. The installation is fully contained and can be completed successfully within a day by almost any capable developer with access to their web servers. Regardless of the architecture of your web-servers, MediaWiki can usually be installed without complaint or issue, requiring little or no modifications to fit within common enterprise configurations. Once successfully installed and tested, the Wiki itself can be themed and configured to suit your requirements with a bit of thought and patience.
Utilizing Wiki based Planning within the Air Force
As a pilot program, our organization authorized an install of MediaWiki 1.15 onto a development server running secure IIS5, PHP5, and MySQL 5.1. Installation and full customization was painless and completed within a week. Further customization and content loading was accomplished by one person over a period of a month, resulting in a demonstration of capability and performance for a sample installation General Plan. The most time-consuming aspect of the pilot was establishing new logical methods of organization and the display of hundreds of small content sections previously listed in a static plan of over 200 pages.
Thanks to the flexibility and the non-linear database system behind MediaWiki, a plan document is not limited to any single method of organization. Through continuing experimentation and research, users and content managers will find ever more efficient ways to categorize and display critical data, resulting in streamlined data and an improved user-experience for senior leadership and management review. By developing your business and life-cycle plans within a Wiki framework, you will truly be creating a living document that encourages users to regularly analyze and improve collaboratively upon the data within it.
Adapting a general plan model to a Wiki framework will require creativity and thoughtful analysis. The benefit of this critical review is that an organization will most likely find redundant or trivial sections and eliminate unnecessary or outdated information and processes. Throughout our pilot program, the organization was able to reduce and optimize a Cold-War era installation plan by over thirty percent, resulting in reduced workload and faster information processing for leadership.
Our pilot program was successfully briefed and demonstrated live to Headquarters Air Force after only two months of in-house development by a single action officer. The unique approach was critically praised by leadership, siting the almost zero cost of development, rapid deployment, and incredibly user-friendly experience. Fully indexed and versioned with history and comparison of every change dating back to the creation of the Wiki; noted discussions and review available behind each section and article; and easily administered control of users groups and permissions were all benefits of our program found to be critical and necessary in any future living document produced within the organization.
Planning for the Future
A full contract to update all sixteen Air Combat Command Installation General Plans was awarded soon after, calling specifically to move them to a MediaWiki framework. Due to difficulties in negotiations with Global Combat Support Services (GCSS), whom develop and operate the Air Force Portal, a plan to incorporate the Wiki framework within the GCSS network was abandoned in favor of utilizing the large and robust Intelligence Community Wiki, Intellipedia-Unclassified, hosted and managed jointly by the Director of National Intelligence and Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (DNI/ICES).
As of October 2009, Air Combat Command manages hundreds of articles relating to their sixteen Base General Plans currently being developed within Intellipedia-U, available to any uniformed service member and federal employee at home or abroad. Plans to incorporate and integrate other related business practices are currently underway, including but not limited to, Sustainable Development Plans, Environmental Assessments and NEPA documents, encroachment playbooks and Anti-Terrorism Force Protection assessments.