USCG: coasting into the future with Web 2.0

By Dorothy Ramienski
Internet Editor
FederalNewsRadio

The U.S. Coast Guard is going full speed ahead with Web 2.0 technology.

Admiral Thad Allen is Commandant with the USCG.

On Friday’s Daily Debrief, he told hosts Christopher Dorobek and Amy Morris that he thinks there’s a fundamental change going on within the federal government and he doesn’t want his organization to fall behind.

I think it goes clear back to the digitalization of our environments staring back in the 1980’s with personal computing and I believe there is a new pattern of behavior emerging in our society where people congregate and aggregate to do things differently using information technology. These are the people we want to bring into the Coast Guard and nurture.

Allen says the Coast Guard has to keep up with new technology because the people who are entering the armed forces are already used to having it around.

The Commandant also says the older members of the Coast Guard can benefit from Web 2.0 by learning about it and connecting with younger workers.

Allen says, while the Coast Guard is going forward, progress is fairly slow.

We’ve basically created a blog site . . . that I post information to. That’s got automatic feeds over to a facebook site, so we can deal in both the dot com and the dot mil domains. It’s mostly trying to make in formation available to people in a different format — one in which the young people really understand — and just kind of show people that you can have a larger conversation with a larger group.

Allen says the blog and the facebook page demonstrate to senior leaders in the Coast Guard just how valuable Web 2.0 can be. This isn’t the only way they’re using the pages, though.

One of them is, how much applicability is there regarding this type of technology and aggregation of social behavior to actual operations in the Coast Guard? If you think about video and imagery that can be translated immediately to blog sites and Web sites, the potential implications for how we might monitor a search and rescue case in the future — if we’re able to put that kind of technology out on our small boats is pretty fantastic if you think about it.

Allen says the Coast Guard experimented with Web 2.0 technology during hurricanes Gustav and Ike.

We push a lot of responsibility down to our field commanders and then just monitored what was going on through conference calls and chat rooms where we were all up at the same time while we were doing senior leader conference calls with Homeland Security and FEMA and so forth. What we found was, everybody heard the information at the same time [and] everybody was able to synchronize our actions and everybody goal-oriented from the start because everybody understood what we were trying to do collectively.

Allen says he hopes the utilization of these new technologies will broaden the scope of the Coast Guard and get younger people interested in signing up. He has been in a number of videos on YouTube trying to get the word out about his organization.

Younger Americans aren’t the only ones he sometimes has to convince. Allen says he’s pushing Web 2.0 and as a tool for those who have been serving in the Coast Guard for years.

My goal is to create better understanding. I’m a great believer in life-long learning and staying fresh in what’s going on and this really is a new way to learn — and re-learning how to learn, in some aspects. [I believe in] making sure the tools that the young people are using are also available to our senior people. They can leverage them and interact with their subordinates in a much more effective manner.

Allen says he’s already gotten a lot of emails from other agencies, but is always open to sharing best practices with anyone who wants to learn more.

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On the Web:

USCG – Commandant’s Corner (2.0)

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