Navy plans internal blog on IT

Navy officials plan to launch a secure blog named the Pulse that will let anyone in the Navy or Marine Corps provide input on information technology issues related to that service, Navy Chief Information Officer Robert Carey said today.

Only those with a Navy or Marine Corps common access card and PKI credentials will have access to the blog, Carey said in an interview after speaking at an AFCEA Bethesda event. The blog is scheduled to start Feb. 8.

In a similar program, Defense Department officials launched a secure social networking tool this week named milBook.

Comments made on the Pulse will appear immediately. With Carey’s existing blog, which is available to the general public, comments are read by a moderator before being posted.

Officials in Carey’s office will be the first to create content and dialogues for the blog within categories such as IT workforce, security and knowledge management, he said.

“As we shape the policy and direction for the Department of the Navy in the IT space, we will create related blog content,” Carey said. “Then everybody in the Department of the Navy has an opportunity to comment on where we’re going. And they can give us their ideas or feedback, or launch an idea themselves.”

As ideas come in, officials from the Navy’s CIO office will decide what to do with them.

“We can act on it if we think it is a good idea, or we can get back to the person saying that’s not the way we’re going to go and thanks for the participation,” Carey said.

Carey expects the entire Navy and Marine Corps community to collaborate on moderating the blog, similarly to how entries are corrected and updated in Wikipedia.

“It will allow us to get a lot of different insights into what we are thinking we need to be doing in the first place,” Carey said. “So it creates a dialogue with 850,000 people to help shape where the Department of Navy is going.”