U.S. General Services Administration

Collaborative Expedition Workshop #67 Nov. 13, 2007

Modeling and Simulation: Walking Through Virtual Environments Together to Advance Shared

PurposeSusan Turnbull, GSA, Co-chair, Emerging Technology

Subcommittee and Co-chair, Social Economic and Workforce Implications of IT,

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VASA – 1628

In design we either hobble or support people’s natural ability to express forms of expertise.

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Building Sustainable Stewardship Practices Across Communities• Collaborative Expedition Workshops and

Collaborative Work Environment Co-sponsors:

– 1. GSA's USA Services – Intergovernmental Solutions

– 2. Emerging Technology SC (ETSC), Architecture and Infrastructure Committee of the Federal CIO Council – http://cio.gov• “Facilitate strategic dialogue among communities of interest.

Through the Expedition Workshops, sponsored by AIC, interested participants experience and learn about new opportunities to adhere to sound architectural principles and implement shared, service-oriented solutions.” from CIOC Strategic Plan

– 3. Subcommittee on Networking and Information Technology R & D (NITRD) and Social, Economic and Workforce Implications of IT and IT Workforce Development (SEW) Coordinating Group, NITRD – http://nitrd.gov

• http://www.gsa.gov/collaborate

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Emerging Technology Subcommittee - ET SCTuning ET Together - From Stovepipes to Wind ChimesPurpose: An “incubator” organizing process to accelerate discovery, maturation, and validation of capabilities that leverage FEA principles and priorities. The key components of charter :

• Greater foresight and discernment as established and emerging technologies compete and converge

• Longer life-cycles through market-based, open standards technologies • Common understanding of business scenarios to anticipate performance

outcomes and mitigate risks. • Improve strategic foresight and collaboration capacity around strategic IT

assets.Key FY08 Activities1. Conduct ET Life-cycle process

http://ET.gov2. Conduct Collaborative

Expedition Workshops with GSA and Subcommittee on Networking for IT Research and Development

ET SC Co-chairs

Susan Turnbull Richard SpivackSusan.turnbull@gsa.gov Richard.Spivack@nist.go

v

202-501-6214 301-975-5063

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Key FY08 Activities1. Conduct http://ET.gov Purpose: “Continue to develop more efficient and effective methods for

sharing information on emerging technologies.” CIOC Strategic Plan

ET.gov stages: 1. Identification: anyone registers ET component using XML schema2. Subscription: community forms around high potential component3. Stewardship: community recognized by ET SC (i.e. IPv6, StratML)4. Graduation: component recognized by Services SC for inclusion in CORE.gov

Key FY08 Actions1. Explore partnering with other

federal settings involved in technology evaluation and transfer

2. Conduct Collaborative Expedition workshops to support networking among ET communities

Contact Information

Jim Disbrow, Program Mgr.

http://ET.gov

Susan TurnbullSusan.Turnbull@gsa.gov

Jim.Disbrow@eia.doe.gov

Richard Spivack, Richard.Spivack@nist.go

v 202-586-1868

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Key FY08 Activities2. Conduct Collaborative Expedition Workshops Purpose: Monthly open workshops to encourage collaboration among government and community implementers of IT and to demonstrate promising capabilities emerging from IT research that aligns with FEA principles

• “Facilitate strategic dialogue among communities of interest. Through the Expedition Workshops, sponsored by AIC, interested participants experience and learn about new opportunities to adhere to sound architectural principles and implement shared, service-oriented solutions.” from CIOC Strategic Plan

• Leadership in virtual collaboration (i.e. Data Reference Model, Geospatial Profile)

Key FY08 Activities/Deliverables

1. Organize around business scenarios from ET.gov & IT R&D communities that address CIOC Strategic Plan and Architecture Principles for the US Government.

2. Organize around CIO requests.

ET SC co-chairs SEW CG co-chairs Susan Turnbull, ET SC

Susan.Turnbull@gsa.gov

Susan Turnbull, SEWSusan.Turnbull@gsa.gov

Richard Spivack, ET SC Richard.Spivak@nist.go

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Suzi Iacono, SEWsiacono@nsf.gov

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Collaborative Expedition Workshops Purpose• Organize around common purpose, larger than

any institution, to appreciate potentials and realities

• Improve quality of dialogue and collaborative prototyping at intergovernmental crossroads

• Participants, representing many forms of expertise, return to their settings with a larger perspective of the “whole”

– De Tocqueville “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions form associations. …In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends on the progress it has made.”

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Collaborative Expedition Workshops

• Create conducive conditions for “Breakthrough” Innovations – from “Need to Know” -> “Need to Share” -> “Build to Share”

– To be Informed (not Overwhelmed) by the Combined Complexity of our Multiple Forms of Expertise

– Authoritative Communities of Interest/ Practice around Common Business Lines

– Agile Framework for Building Intergovernmental Services

– Emergence of Open Collaboration, Open Standards, Semantic Technologies

• “In design, we either hobble or support people’s natural ability to express forms of expertise.” Prof. David D. Woods

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Building Sustainable Stewardship Practices Across Communities• How can multiple Communities of Practice

discover and organize around common mission needs to build shared understanding?

• How can shared understanding around several select, urgent cross-boundary scenarios be accelerated?

• What is the role of collaborative prototyping around emerging technology potential, in light of the Federal Enterprise Architecture's Reference Models?

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Building Sustainable Stewardship Practices Across CommunitiesKey Findings:

• FY03 - Agile business components in innovative settings not easily discovered by e-government managers, resulting in lost or delayed opportunities for all parties.

• FY04 - Growing Opportunity to apply Emerging Technologies (web services, grid computing, and semantic web) to tune up Innovation Pipeline with better linkages.

• FY05 - Collaborative Work Environment expands effective networking across intergovernmental communities and complements monthly Collaborative Expedition Workshops; validated efficacy with Data Reference Model Working Group

• FY06-07 - Networking Among Communities of Practice/ Interest with Communities co-organizing the workshops, provides conducive environment to build shared understanding toward joint action around promising technology potentials

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Going Forward: From Stovepipes to Wind-Chimes• Value:

"Frontier Outpost" to open up quality conversations, augmented by “light-weight” tools, to leverage collaborative capacity of united, but diverse sectors of society, seeking to discover, frame, and act on national potentials. 66 workshops since March, 2001

• 60-80 participants per workshop• > 20 Communities of Practice• FY07: 1.7 millions visits to site/5.62 million file downloads

• FY08 Alignment: Networking for Multiplicative Returns

– Putting it all together - Planning upcoming workshops together

– Building shared understanding of fundamental concepts needed for communities representing diverse forms of expertise, to work together to leverage toward improved citizen service delivery at lower cost.

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Build on Recent Workshop Purpose and Questions To explore the potentials and realities of innovative,

Intergovernmental Practices for advancing dialogue between Government and Citizens in Support of Citizen-Centric Services.

• 1. What are the potentials and realities for Networking among Intergovernmental Communities of Practice and Communities of Interest (CoPs/ CoIs)? What role(s) can these Communities play as Innovation Catalysts in a Services Economy?

• 2. How can we establish new “norms” for collaborating together across institutional boundaries?

• 3. What are the national scenarios where distributed collaboration will be fundamental to national readiness and effective joint action by institutions?

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Build on Recent Workshop: Purpose and Questions

• 4. How can we draw on strategic leadership communities and "best practices" to move toward more agile cyberinfrastructure that transcends the high costs of insularity and advance needed innovation?

• 5. What are the opportunities for leveraging greater transparency and openness to achieve mission agility and greater value from existing and future information assets?

• 6. What "light-weight" tools are needed to support emergent governance across intergovernmental communities? How can these tools bootstrap open collaborative development with the agility needed by intergovernmental communities and their individual host institutions?

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Today’s Workshop Questions• 1. What are the Public Good aspects of Civic Design that can advance shared understanding

and collaboration in the Public Realm?

• 2. What is the current understanding around Public Information relative to government and non-government web resources, data collections, and knowledge repositories?

• 3. What are the current and future contributions of wiki namesake pages, Emerging Technology Life-cycle (http://et.gov) process and Strategy Markup Language (StratML) and similar aggregators for discovery and organizing that scales across individuals, communities of practice, and institutions?

• 4. How can relevant stakeholders tap "build to share" principles being advanced by forward-looking information stewardship organizations, including

– d) Virtual organizations – a) Digital data and information communities advancing sound approaches for electronically stored

information. Examples include librarians, curators, web content managers, ontologists, researchers, artists, historians, data managers, and records managers.

– b) Open Standards bodies and consortia – c) International stewardship associations

• 5. How do we create simulations that help us strategize on where to shore up priority weaknesses during rapid growth – including the need for faster learning by people representing multiple disciplines?

• 6. How do we build from the best of Operations Research and also draw upon generational differences in a manner that reinforces strengths?

• 7. How do we provide the right sets of information flowing into and out of mission-rehearsal simulations, etc. so the policy nuggets travel up even when the learning is experiential?

• 8. What common messages can ripple across communities with deep and diverse experience with distributed collaboration, collections development, and scholarly knowledge infrastructure?

• 9. What are the conducive conditions for the creativity needed among the networked communities doing this work?

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Today’s Workshop Questions

• 10. What are the emerging strategies for advancing public web content, collections management, and scholarly knowledge infrastructures with the resilience to mitigate disruptions or degradations of service over time?

• 11. What strategies are emerging to advance the public's awareness and participation in science, global virtual collections, and scholarly knowledge infrastructures?

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Draft Scenarios for Afternoon Break-out sessions

• 1. Informal communities from many settings building trust and creating agreements to share data and tools

• 2. Government-wide improvement communities

• 3. Ontology of what’s needed in modeling and simulation

– What Works?– What Doesn’t Work?– What Needs to be Created?– What Do We Need to Know?