One part of government that is working....NIEM

You see a lot of gridlock in government today - health care, spending, partisan bickering, Not very conducive to making anything happen. I won't even start to talk about all the dumb projects that seem to consume dollars but produce no results...but here is a great example of something that is working very well:

I attended a National Information Exchange Model Town Hall last week and the theme was the desire to advance their cause and make the movement of data between governemnt agencies easy at the "plumbing" level. They wanted feedback so they could align their strategic planning session with what was needed by their supporters.

The event harnessed people from all corners - government, commercial, contractors, NGO and many others. There was some good information presented, but the overwhelming amount of time went toward gathering feedback on how NIEM could be more successful, address a greater audience, and gather information on when it is successful.

This has been an organization that has put some very good things in place that will work across government - and is a true collaboration of agencies - DHS and DOJ taking the lead, but many others particpating.

This effort has enormous impacts for saving lives and property, decreasing the friction between agencies when transfering data, and helping transparency efforts in terms of making the data usable once it is accessible.

There were certainly different points of view on what the mission should be, and how the mission should be explained to non-technical participants and would be supporters like Congress, but it was a high energy, well constructed 4 hours. Kudos.

Universal interoperability - one example

The world is a tough place filled with disconnected, non-interoperable elements.

One standard that works great everywhere I've been is "Thank you", part of XGL (XML Gratitude Language). When expressed sincerely in a bi-directional or even uni-directional manner, it inspires people, makes them glad you showed up, makes you glad you showed up, and generallly improves things greatly!

I'm leaving Australia after 3 intense, action packed work weeks and a little fun. A big "Thank You" to the whole country for a delightful experience.

Interoperable language.....

If you are reading this, you speak English, right?

What version of English, and is it interopeable.....having spent the last 2.5 weeks in Australia, you might be suprised how many different words there are that are different, or some of the same words that in fact mean different things.

"2/5 of bugger off" is my favorite so far - it translates to basically "nuttin" in Brooklyn, or "you're unlikely to realize any upside" in Silicon Valley.

Plenty of other examples that I'm compiling.....anyone else run into this problem in other English speaking countries?

Good article

http://newsmax.com/Headline/obama-weapons-mass-destruction/2010/01/26/id/348085


Obama administration earns an F from WMD panel. Interoperable data would help this once you get over the turf issues. When will we learn to share?

Interoperable travel (and not)

I’m in the air on the way to Melbourne, Australia to do 3 weeks of work on a variety of things. I thought it would be interesting to note the standards that delighted, or were used or abused along the way:

Good things:
1. English: It’s nice to have a standardized communications interface all along, and comforting for me to know that all the pilots have standardized on English as their standard command language. I enjoy going to other cultures and trying different languages for pleasure, but work is much easier without translation.
2. Internet: a glimpse into the future of global standards – its all the same and familiar no matter where I am for the next 3 weeks. Could run into a modem if I get to the outback, but unlikely.
3. Commerce: Got VISA? No problem. Need cash? ATMs abound. Sure beats letters of credit, money belts and travelers checks of yesteryear. Score one for interoperable, cross organization data and security.
4. Government: Seems like a pretty standardized disregard/disdain of government everyplace I landed, though it’s pretty remarkable how well we seem to have figured out a lot of things in terms of governance, visas, and the like. I’m not going to comment on security.
5. Airline reservation system: Built in the 60’s and improved ever since – pretty amazing when you start to think about all the moving parts that it encompasses.

Frustrating or suboptimal:
1. Left side driving – no renting a car in Australia – I’m not comfortable driving on the other side of the road – what if we all went one way or the other worldwide – what would cumulative impact on manufacturing, travel, etc be?
2. Plugs: My adapter is at the ready for Australia, and can interface me to about 9 other countries as well. Too bad we don’t have a globalized standard – though you can understand that it grew up separately.
3. That pesky metric system: This is “our bad” in the US. I remember in 5th grade we were going to convert, and we bailed apparently – likely that last generation of lobbyists.
4. Cell phone: I’ve gone from unlimited usage to $1.69 a minute while I’m down under. Hello, Skype.
5. Wireless roaming – sheesh, you think there would be transparency and some simple way to do this without yanking out your credit card every time – like telling TMobile to make it happen as long as it doesn’t cost more than $5/hour for short term access.

NGO Interoperability with governments

The feedback I'm getting on Haiti is that everyone is working their heart out trying to make things happen, save lives, treat the wounded, and keep some stability going.

The feedback that I'm also getting is that information sharing between all the various agencies is very difficult, hamstrings the effective deployment of resources and generally diminishes all the heroic efforts.

I recommend that the NGO leadership across a wide range organizations take the reins of this problem, work with or adopt some of the best principles of OASIS and NIEM.gov, and continue to build a set of interoperable, XML based transactions that can be shared in an emergency. CAP (Common Alerting Protocol), HAVE (hospital Availability) and RM (resource messaging) are great starting points and ready to go after a lot of hard work and testing by the groups developing these.

These are free to the world, and their adopted use will encourage/force system vendors to adopt and expand their use dramatically.

If everyone shoots the same interoperable information "bullets" we'll get some great economies of scale, very good sharing, and the ability to build on this layer with predictive analytics, credential management, volunteer and skills manifests that can all be shared across the organizations in a disaster/incident.

There is going to be a major virtual exercise in August that is open for worldwide participation, email me at peterlodell@gmail.com for details.

What will we learn in Haiti??? The same thing!

Its early in this tragic disaster, but we've already seen how effective off the shelf social media tools have been in establishing communications and getting the adhoc word out. Regular people were skyping, tweeting, and sending pictures through regular old email.

What we'll also likely see is that the relief organizations can't talk to one another's emergency relief systems, that the military will not communicate will with all the NGOS, and that the internal Hatian based systems will be interoperable with all......

We need a strong implementation effort on intereoperable data like Common Alerting Protocol and other emergency management formats under development. Another example of not being able to connect the dots when lives are at risk.