What is A-Space? It has been the most publicized government IT project in a long time, but media coverage simply describes it as "Facebook for Spies." Yes, it's a social network that will finally let intelligence analysts network and collaborate. But I think it has much larger implications beyond just giving analysts a new tool. I've been developing a pilot A-Space tool for the past year, and from my vantage point, it's clear that independent Web developers will play a crucial role in A-Space's success--and, by extension, U.S. national security. In the process, I think those same developers can change the way the entire government acquires software. Unfortunately, A-Space managers have not yet reached out to the developer community. I'm going to try to do it for them, starting with this brief column.

Recently, my netfriend Jeffrey Carr wrote an O'Reilly Radar piece about BRIDGE, the Intelligence Comunity's testbed for new community and analysis tools. He focused mainly on the user angle: anyone can sign up for BRIDGE and use the tools (if your request is approved by an existing user). It's unclassified, so you don't get to see any secrets, but you do get to use information management apps that were created to help intelligence analysts do their jobs better.

This is important: these evaluations will form the basis for purchase decisions, which is a much wiser use of your tax dollars than the old way, when they bought software before the intended users ever laid eyes on it.

Disclaimer: I, along with Josh Knowles, developed one of the five pilot apps on BRIDGE.

On top of open usage, there's another angle that I think is even more important: open provision. In addition to asking you to review these tools, they're asking you to build them as well. (If this sounds familiar, I wrote about this a few weeks ago, but there's new information in this post.)

Sean Dennehy and Don Burke, the CIA's lead curators and advocates for Intellipedia, have been nominated for the Service To America medal:

When Sean Dennehy and Don Burke were tasked with increasing knowledge sharing across the intelligence community in 2005, it was like being asked to promote vegetarianism in Texas. Against the odds, these analysts in the Central Intelligence Agency have succeeded in creating a tool that breaks with the prevailing culture, increases the flow of information and ultimately makes our country safer...

When an intelligence analyst writes a paper, it quickly becomes stale; in some cases, because of the time it takes to review and publish reports, they're stale before anyone ever sees them. With Intellipedia (which is a slightly modified MediaWiki installation), analysts and policymakers can always have a live version of the Intelligence Community's collective knowledge and assessments.

ODNI and CIA officials were quick to recognize the magnitude of Burke and Dennehy’s accomplishment. "It’s hard to overstate what they did," Eric Haseltine, former chief technology officer of the intelligence community, said. "They made a major transformation almost overnight with no money after other programs failed to achieve these results with millions of dollars in funding." (emphasis added)

If you're in New York this week, take note that it is Internet Week. It kicks off Monday night with the fourth gathering of IgniteNYC, where I (along with 13 others) will be giving a 5-minute presentation, with 20 slides auto-advancing every 15 seconds. (Here's more on the Ignite format.) My presentation will be on A-Space, which I've written about here before.

The current draft of the 2010 Intelligence Authorization Bill asks intelligence agencies to trim their contractor workforce by up to 11%* and replace them with government employees. (See page 8 of the PDF.)

Note that they are being asked, not required, to do this. But doing so could save a lot of money, and IT is the perfect place to start. (I say this as a federal IT contractor.)