Social networking comes to DISA's collaboration site

In an effort to improve cooperation between members of the Defense Department community who might be tackling similar projects and issues, the Defense Information System Agency is building on its Forge.mil collaborative tool with the launch of the Forge.mil Community social networking capability.

The capability allows users to collaborate at the community level on broader challenges that may go beyond single projects or a set of projects.

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Forge.mil Community, which DISA touts as a social networking layer, is designed to help the program’s users better coordinate, share information and manage content, and also provides a more holistic view of forge.mil’s hundreds of projects and thousands of software releases, DISA officials said.

“We knew the community layer would be a tremendous benefit to our customer base by allowing users to organize around communities of interest that make sense to them, and it’s been very well accepted with more than 10,000 users added during the beta test phase,” said Dan Gahafer, forge.mil program manager, in a DISA press release.

Forge.mil Community users can create groups based on areas of interest, organizations, mission areas, specific technologies or other topics of interest to the IT acquisition workforce.

Forge.mil is built on two platforms: SoftwareForge, which allows shared development and use of open-source software, and ProjectForge, which provides DOD community teams with a secure, private, web-based collaborative software development environment.