Collaboration and Social Media
KDE Topic AreaPosts
The Importance of Leadership Presence, with Dr. Vinod Jain
In this episode of the MITRE Knowledge Driven Podcast, Principal Economics and Business Analyst, Dr. Vinod Jain, shares his experience in unlocking leadership presence and offers insightful guidance on how anyone can achieve their own sense of presence.
Uniting to Fight the Global Water Crisis
John Halamka, president of the Mayo Clinic Platform, and Doc Hendley, founder of Wine To Water, a nonprofit organization that helps communities around the world develop sustainable clean water solutions, spoke at a MITRE speaker series event this spring. They spoke about the challenges communities at home and abroad face accessing clean water. Read how this speaker series impacted Liv Blackmon, which led to over 50 employees signing up to help and donate to World Water Day.
Energy Masters: Improving the Water and Energy Efficiency of Under-Invested Communities
“Weatherizing my home? What does that mean?” “I’m only renting. Why should I care?” “That sounds complicated and expensive.”
These are common responses Kathy Huynh would hear from renters living in the lower-income apartment complexes where she spent time volunteering as an Energy Master. Energy Masters is a program focused on providing information and services for under-invested communities in Arlington and Alexandria. The objective is to help residents decrease their energy and water usage and utility bills, while, ideally, increasing comfort levels in units.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love (Certain) Public-Private Partnerships
In 2012, The Economist penned an obituary for the Public-Private Partnership (PPP). The headline: ‘RIPPP’. Eight years later however PPPs are very much alive and the appetite for them has not slowed in spite of high-profile scandals and debates about the commodification of public infrastructure.
PPPs, while diverse and increasingly complex, can most easily be thought of as a long-term contract between a public agency and a private party to execute or operate a project.
Getting Students Excited About STEM (and MITRE), with Willie Hill
The STEM field has been described as the great equalizer, a field that celebrates and elevates those who contribute to it. Still, many students, especially students of color, find it intimidating and hard to approach. Fortunately, individuals like Willie Hill are dedicating their time and talents to show students of all backgrounds that STEM is fun and worth getting excited about.
Working Upstream to Enrich Veteran Wellness and Prevent Suicide
This story is the first in a series about how The MITRE Corporation tackles complex problems. This first article probes the concept of upstream thinking in the context of veteran wellness and the value of designing with people rather than for them.
An Update on the Aviation Industry, with Michael Wells and Bob Brents
Air travel has become so commonplace to the point where many of us never even think about the wonder of flying on an aircraft or being able to send things around the world over night. And yet every day, countless agencies and individuals around the world move in a coordinated ballet even in the face of a global pandemic.
Come Together: Knitting as Craft and Metaphor for Building Virtual Social Culture
As the Coronavirus began impacting social and professional life, I noticed a lot of friends, family, and acquaintances posting to social media that they were learning or relearning how to knit and crochet.
Theodore Wilson: Thinking Like a Turtle
Theodore “Turtle” Wilson has made a name for himself inspiring change. MITRE has never been short on good ideas, but getting others to embrace those ideas is always a challenge. That’s when you need to call in someone who can empathize with the folks you want to help, while seeing the big picture—someone like Turtle.
Slack—Fast becoming MITRE’s virtual coffee shop
MITRE staff, teleworkers, and business partners are attending more and more meetings virtually from different locations. Among the options at MITRE for communicating and sharing non-sensitive information, Slack, a cloud-based team collaboration tool, has become a meeting place where people can work productively and feel comfortable—much like a virtual coffee shop.
Interview with Ali Zaidi on designing lessons in artificial intelligence
Ali Zaidi is a MITRE data scientist tackling an interesting challenge for MITRE as part of his work for Generation AI Nexus. As the fields of machine learning and data science have grown, the need for machine learning education has become a necessity of many fields few would associate with computer science.
MITRE Creates Playbook on Medical Device Cybersecurity
Guidance developed with FDA outlines preparedness and response recommendations for healthcare delivery organizations and others.
Acquisition in the Digital Age (AiDA™): A Game Changer in Federal Acquisition
Federal acquisition is easy and straightforward, said no one ever. Rules, regulations, policies, procedures, definitions, requirements, contracts, forms—constantly updated …
Making: It’s in our DNA
Exhibitors included Lead Visualization/Graphics Software Engineer Sacha Panic. His “If there was no gravity” exhibits were grounded in his research of human perception and control of spatial orientation….
fleetForecaster Keeps U.S. Aviation System a Step Ahead
This award-winning project enables the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to forecast the future aviation fleet in the United States. Previously, having to contract externally for this forecast, the FAA had minimal insight into how the forecast was produced…
Collaboration has a Sweet Spot in Team Chat Tools
If you could be connected to your teammates at will, but not miss anything if you weren’t AND your communications didn't require email AND you could search the messages later effortlessly, would you opt in? Daniel Weiss explains why persistent chat is so popular and...
MITRE’s Commercial Aviation Dashboard Improves Air Traffic Management, Flight Safety
With the increasing demand for a diversity of new entrant operations come a variety of economic efficiency challenges. A MITRE team collaborating with the Federal Aviation Administration and industry experts is developing technology to make it easier for FAA’s air...
Getting the Word Out and Bringing Back the News
MITRE staff are lifelong learners—it’s not hard to engage us in conversation online or in person or both at the same time. Somewhere in the swirl of activity, however, someone needs to capture the connections and outcomes, of course. For MITRE’s Center for Advanced...
Intranet Organization Pages Make Data Easy to Find and Hard to Miss
MITRE’s intranet team stays on top of trends like responsive design. They also keep us responsive to one another so that we can engage in the reachback that helps us answer our customers’ questions. In this post, the authors describe how MITRE’s Organization Pages...
Pearls of Wisdom: Part 2
This second post on the challenges of retaining corporate know-how in the face of changing work-force demographics reviews an extended conversation among interested MITRE staff. Because it’s always easier to come up with ideas than to implement them, this group...
Pearls of Wisdom: Part 1
This first of two posts covers some of the challenges of retaining the know-how of experienced staff in the face of changing work-force demographics. The authors compare tacit and explicit knowledge, and consider how companies might capture and retain this rich...
What does it mean to share: MITRE developers talk about the value of documentation
When you hear the word documentation, if the first image that pops into your head is the crummy user guide you just threw away, you are in for a surprise. In the hands of Alex Lyte, John Griffith, Tod Levitt, and Leo Obrst, documentation is an indispensable business...
With Patient Toolkit, Sharing Improves Caring
MITRE's Patient Toolkit mobile app enables chronically ill patients to better manage knowledge about their conditions, track their symptoms and medications, and communicate what they know to their healthcare providers. MITRE has a simple process to enable companies to...
Using Immersive Visualization to Make Strategic Choices
Cognitive assistance isn’t mainstream yet, but decision support tools that enable decision-makers to understand tradeoffs in multiple dimensions are available. Shawn Chin and Rick Haberlin, who built one such tool, make the case that “engagement requires visualization...
The Daily Standup
In Liz Hayes’s post about routine check-ins, seemingly simple collaboration processes and trust enable hard-working, distributed teams to succeed. —Editor Author: Liz HayesI joined a new project last summer, a Global Information System (GIS) effort run by Keith W....
Your Guide to Connecting Projects, People, Content, and Partners
This guide describes and points to resources that help staff thrive in their assignments. It outlines the tools and systems in place for planning and execution, all in support of the way that MITRE does business. As staff enable reliable knowledge capture and reuse,...
Ending Isolation and Building a Unified Team Across Distributed Sites
As a workforce becomes increasingly distributed, it is more important than ever to facilitate, ensure, and capture collaboration in order to share knowledge effectively and efficiently; effective communication is essential to achieving business goals. As mobile...
Avoiding Single Points of Failure Through Knowledge Sharing
Knowledge management is all about making sure that all components of an organization, project, or task can work together regardless of staff rotation. We capture, store, share, analyze, and share some more precisely because who’s coming or going will change. Sadia...
Do you MOOC? Could you? Would you gMOOC?
The phrase corporate training may sound like, well, school, but in the hands of Lara Van Nostrand, it is anything but. Her team sets up collaborative learning experiences that take advantage of online classes held elsewhere (e.g., Coursera), interactive survey...
Recent MITRE publication, Sociocultural Behavior Sensemaking: State of the Art in Understanding the Operational Environment, Demonstrates Value of Collaborative Knowledge Management Practices
Dr. David Foster, a social behavioral scientist at MITRE, faced a challenge when he signed up to field edit Sociocultural Behavior Sensemaking: State of the Art in Understanding the Operational Environment. An anthology of the ideas of 40 people across government,...
Gestalt Wikis at MITRE: Origins
Gestalt Wikis at MITRE: Origins
This blog post is the first of four in a series about Gestalt Wikis at MITRE. MITRE began using wikis on the corporate intranet in 2005 with the volunteer grassroots creation of MITREpedia. MITREpedia uses open source MediaWiki[1] as its underlying wiki software. The objective as stated in its Main Page was to capture information about MITRE “people, projects, organizations, customers, technology and more.”[2] In a recent conversation with its founder, Harry Sleeper, the motivation behind MITREpedia was elaborated as to provide a collaborative environment where staff could author linked narratives of well-formed, detailed knowledge about their work.
New Online Journal: “Social Media for Organizations”
With the popularity of social media in purely social contexts, I’ve been fascinated by the implications for using these tools for work-related purposes. In recent years, organizations of all types—whether they are industrial, academic, government, or non-profit—are increasingly turning to social media tools such as wikis, blogs, microblogs, and social networking for internal use. By doing so, they hope to enhance collaboration, streamline business processes, and improve relationships.
Enterprise Social, Five Years in
In 2009, “social” was still a buzzword, Facebook was years away from an IPO, and Instagram has not been invented. Yet a groundswell was beginning – people used to the ease of sharing in their online social networks came to their offices, only to find that exchanging information was difficult at best. Communications flowed from the top of the organizational hierarchy down, flooding the already overflowing email inboxes – while cross-organizational collaboration was severely impeded.