GSA to launch social network for feds and contractors

The General Services Administration is creating an online social network for federal employees and contractors in hopes of enhancing collaboration across government agencies.

The platform, dubbed FedSpace, will be available to employees while they are at work as an alternative to third-party social networking and collaboration sites, which are often inaccessible from government computers. The effort will be led by the GSA's Office of Citizen Services Federal Center for New Media and Citizen Engagement and is likely to be rolled out incrementally, with the first phase debuting this fall.

"The goal is create a common collaboration platform across the agencies," GSA Associate Administrator David McClure told Hillicon Valley on Thursday. McClure said his organization is working through the design currently and is "trying to do it right."

McClure said FedSpace will have features from several networking sites, including Facebook-style profiles, blogs and a wiki so employees can share information. Rather than building the system from scratch, GSA is pulling elements from other federal programs so it can speed the launch. The pilot project will be hosted on the cloud, which McClure hopes will help prove that cloud applications are cheaper and easier to deploy.

Since FedSpace will be used on secure government networks, McClure said GSA is focused on security measures such as identity management and user authentication.

He said his office is doing outreach to communities across the government to ensure the platform is widely adopted once it goes live. Eventually he hopes the system will include ways to manage work flows and allow multiples users to share documents and collaborate on revisions.