The Air Force hopes a soon-to-be-launched Gov 2.0 project will spur collaboration, improve knowledge management, and enhance education and training within the service, said an Air Force official Nov. 16 at KMWorld, a knowledge management conference in Washington, D.C.

As Lt. Col. Mike Hower, research director of Air Force Forums at Alabama's Maxwell Air Force Base, sees it, the service faces two challenges which social learning may be able to solve.

The first problem is the lack of officer education, said Hower. While some officers get the opportunity to go to school four times over the course of a career, "there's a good chance that, in a 20-year officer's career, the only formal training that an officer's going to get is one, six-week course at the age of 21 or 22."

The second problem is that Air Force changes officers' duties about every two years. "How do you ever get any expertise if you're moving around from job to job every 24 months?"

With a nod to the Army's MilSpace, Hower is creating a program to address these problems. He led a team, which included graduate students at Air University, and successfully stood up a forum for squadron commanders in 2006. Within in a year, half of the service's 2,500 squadron commanders were actively using the program and learning from each other, Hower said.

On July 1, the current Air Force Forums project will likely end and shortly afterward will merge with a new program, drawing from Air Force University's research on requirements and training. This tool will be used by the entire Air Force, with the goal of making the Air Force a learning organization, focused on knowledge management, continuous learning and precision learning.

Among Hower's lessons learned from developing a social, knowledge-management tool for the Air Force are:

• Know what you want to accomplish before development;
• users benefit from aggregated and integrated content (in other words, give the user information and allow him to comment and share it);
• one size does not fit all and some users will prefer forums, groups, wikis or video over other communication modes;
• the social profile, versus the professional profile, is where learning, search and networking meet;
• enable the ability for users to find an expert;
• moderate and ensure quality content so that people continue to engage with the tool; and
• facilitate engagement by pushing, pulling and prodding--typically in the form of email reminders. 

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