The Defense Information Systems Agency plans to provide Forge.mil access to developers within the intelligence community.

"We intend to support the intelligence community. I don't think we've thought through much further than that," said Forge.mil Project Manager Dan Gahafer during an April 20 press call.

"I believe Homeland Security, which we've actually been in communication with, is interested in setting up their own implementation of a Forge.mil, if you will. But we do intend to support the intelligence community," he added.

Currently, the software development platform is only accessible to those working on Defense Department IT projects--workers with a common access card, or an external certificate authority (ECA) certificate and DoD sponsorship, said Gahafer.

Just last week DISA expanded its Forge.mil user base with the addition of a community component. The new social layer encourages participation from stakeholders who may not be actively building software but want to share or gather industry information, said Gahafer. The new component--a March beta release of Forge.mil Community preceded a mid-April launch--already boasts 10,000 users, he said.

While SoftwareForge, the biggest Forge.mil project site with almost 9,000 registered users, allowed collaboration between members of an individual project for information sharing and code re-use, looking beyond project silos for information was difficult, said Gahafer.

Forge.mil Community allows users to collaborate along interest or technical lines and not just project lines. They're also able to seamlessly move between the community side to SoftwareForge or ProjectForge.

"The community layer allows communities of interest to communicate with one another without knowing a lot about the individual projects, it's difficult to find that in a SoftwareForge environment," said Gahafer.

"By collaborating across a community of interest you might be able to find that another project has solved a difficult problem that you're working on and you could communicate that, provide that information to the other project and they could go get your code," he said.

The DISA-maintained Forge.mil service aims to improve the ability of the DoD to develop and deliver software, services and systems in support of defense IT.

For more:
- listen to the press call
- visit https://community.forge.mil (accessible to those with DoD CAC or ECA certification)

Related Articles:  
Audio: DISA shares more about Forge.mil Community
Q&A: Gunnar Hellekson on open source adoption in government  
Sorenson: Army should emulate Apple 
Military OKs classified open-source software