In the most recent New Yorker magazine, an article details how the Defense Department is using virtual reality gaming software to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, an mental illness afflicting soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. The program, which takes soldiers back into the streets and battles in Iraq with scenes that look identical to a kid's upscale video game, is called Virtual Iraq.

More than a year before, Nextgov editor at large Bob Brewin wrote an article about using virtual reality to treat PTSD while working for Government Health IT. If you think gaming software – or virtual reality exposure therapy, as its practitioners call it – has no place in treating these soldiers suffering from PTSD, consider this from Brewin's article:

Wiki forces are upon us. With the wiki concept, an individual posts an idea publicly. Then over time, subsequent contributors add to, adjust, or take away from the idea iteratively. Over time, with input from many players, what starts as a primitive idea can grow into a well-developed statement. The most dramatic example of the power of wikis is Wikipedia.

Recognition that collaborative efforts can lead to great results is growing in both the public and private sectors. What distinguishes the wiki approach from previous collaborative initiatives is that contributors to the process can be “amateurs” rather than professionals. Anyone can contribute. The contributions of some may be modest, focusing on the correction of spelling and grammatical errors. The contributions of others may be deeper – for example, they may focus on developing and refining foundational ideas. The Wikipedia experience has shown that well-articulated and valuable insights can emerge through this process.

Government agencies are mulling over the wiki phenomenon to determine its value in the public sector. Its value can be seen at three levels of operation:

• Project level: In building new systems, requirements can be harvested through wiki exercises. That is, a primitive statement of system requirements can be posted publicly. Customers and technical people can be asked to build on this primitive statement in order to create a full-blown set of requirements that reflect both customer and technical sensibilities.
• Intra-agency level: When an agency plans to launch a program that will change how it operates, inputs from employees and contractors handled through wiki processes can help the agency to formulate the program architecture more quickly and comprehensively than by setting up a task force to do the job.
• Inter-agency level: Government agencies tend to operate as stove pipes. However, this can lead to poor results, as the 9/11 catastrophe showed us. Because US intelligence agencies did not share their knowledge and insights regarding terrorist activity, the US was unable to anticipate and prevent the 9/11 attack. Government agencies can establish wikis to span organizational boundaries. The intelligence community did this after 9/11 when the created Intellipedia, three wikis that solicit contributions from employees of 16 intelligence agencies. Early results from this effort are encouraging.

There are two basic advantages to a wiki approach. First, because it is carried out in a virtual environment, it can be implemented quickly. There is no need to assemble committees of experts who deliberate indefinitely. Second, because it solicits input from a wide range of contributors spanning organizational boundaries, it has the potential of generating solutions that are both deep and broad.

Government should experiment with cross-boundary collaboration at the project, intra-agency, and inter-agency level. The tendency of bureaucracies to operate inside boxes is well-known, as are the perils – particularly the curse of parochialism. However, in exploring the strengths of collaborative action, government should avoid marching around with the wiki tool in search of applications. First, it should identify situations where collaborative inputs would help it function more effectively. Then it should determine whether a wiki approach is appropriate to engender meaningful collaboration, or whether some other approach is better. Finally, it needs to address the details of implementing a wiki solution – Are we able to establish a wiki platform? Will our organizational culture promote meaningful participation by the intended audience? As wiki solutions to problems emerge, will they be taken seriously by the agency’s management?

Lisa Porter, director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity suggests in an interview that one way for intelligence agencies to better comb the tsunami of data they now collect is by using virtual worlds. She doesn't elaborate in her Q&A in the May issue of IEEE Spectrum magazine, but IARPA already has a project underway to collect data about virtual worlds.

IARPA is the intelligence version of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where, incidentally, Porter once worked. In the interview, she discusses the new tripartite organization for IARPA. Its three program offices are Smart Collection, Incisive Analysis, and Safe and Secure Operations. The agency lives in the Office of Science and Technology at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

IARPA recently announced it will be snooping around the virtual world via a foxy little project called Reynard, a fox who is the hero of Medieval satires about social manners and classes. It's a study of emerging social dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games being conducted by the Incisive Analysis program.

Porter told the magazine that she is looking for people to run projects within the agency's three programs. IARPA is designed to do high-risk, high-payoff advanced intelligence research, so she is looking for "very smart people who understand what it takes not just to technically comprehend a problem but how to bring an idea to reality programmatically," she said.

The IARPA.gov Web site soon will carry instructions and forms for applying to run projects there.

IARPA will cooperate with DARPA and work closely with In-Q-Tel, the intelligence community's venture capital fund, even though In-Q-Tel's focus is near-term, high-risk problems, Porter said.

IARPA's current location -- on the University of Maryland campus, albeit in a fenced and guarded National Security Agency compound -- is intended to signal the agency's openness to academics and others outside the intel world whose ideas and skills could help solve huge problems such as sorting through data, figuring out how to better target and winnow what intel agencies collect and how to keep that information safe in the Web-enabled world.

The new partnership between IBM and virtual-world-builder Forterra Systems Inc. won't be affected by IBM's suspension from federal contracting, according to Forterra's Vice President for Marketing, Chris Badger.

"Nothing has changed with Forterra's plan to partner with IBM around the Babel Bridge program," he said April 1 via email. "This program starts development this quarter with two releases planned for this year- one later this summer and the second one by end of year. I am sure that IBM will have cleared up the temporary debarment for federal contracts by the time our releases are available later this year."

The plan is for IBM to incorporate Forterra in its Unified Communications and Collaboration platform to help solve the problems created by interoperability among intelligence agency communications systems. The enhanced product will meld Forterra’s On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment 3-D platform with IBM’s Lotus Notes calendar Sametime.

Babel Bridge will allow agencies to instantly share information and interact in a synthetic world to plan operations and take real-time action in the real world, according to the companies.

Badger said the project has been going great guns since it was announced March 20. "We have received very strong interest outside the government market, particularly in the corporate and healthcare markets," he said. "This broader interest beyond the government markets is actually reinforcing the need to invest in near term, robust product development and marketing plans."

IBM is a leading large-industry player in virtual worlds, as well. The company was represented at last year's inaugural conference of the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds. It's unclear whether or how the suspension would affect and fledgling agency efforts in virtual world Second Life or elsewhere in the metaverse.

As a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, I feel I am entitled to take a gentle poke at the group now and then, and goodness knows, I have. Sometimes it has seemed to me more like a cigar-smoke-filled gentleman's club home to endless arguments about the "M" in OMB than a leader in public service innovation. But lo and behold, along comes NAPA's new Collaboration Project to blow a hole in my misconceptions.

NAPA officially kicked off the project in February, but it was born at a dinner table. NAPA president Jenna Dorn had just pushed back after a pleasant meal with old friend Kip Hawley, Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, when Hawley said he had one word for her, ala "The Graduate." "Wiki," he said, and Dorn was off. "He’s always been cutting edge," says Dorn. "I read everything I could about it."

As the 53-year-old editor chiefly responsible for the controversial photograph of a young woman with a nose piercing on the December 2006 cover of Government Executive magazine, I straddle the workplace generational divide. My gray hair gives me street cred among aging boomers. My regular use of YouTube videos on my blog, my Facebook page and my Second Life avatar give me cache among those born after 1980.

So I feel comfortable saying to those of you in my demographic and older: Millennials are here. They're wired. Get over it.

Especially in matters technological, millennials are changing the workplace whether boomers approve or not. And often, we don't. Take last week's story here on NextGov about millennials as computer security risks. You can almost see the raised eyebrows through the lines in Symantec's finding that millennials pose a risk to network security. Just about all the IT managers interviewed grumped about millennials' freewheeling Internet practices, such as checking their personal email and Facebook pages and banking online while at work.

But while the tech czars grumble, those who manage millennials or struggle to lure them into government, are mellowing. They are finding young digital natives to be an asset, not a pain. The Army, for example, was an early adapter with its computer game recruiting tool America's Army. In late 2006, the CIA's National Clandestine Service set up a Facebook group to recruit new employees. NASA, NOAA the CDC and other agencies have entered the virtual world, namely Second Life, in part to meet milennials where they live.

And in a January white paper, "On Learning: The Future of Air Force Education and Training," the Air Education and Training Command proposed creating a virtual base, called MyBase, an obvious allusion to the so-five-minutes-ago millennial hang-out MySpace.

What's fun about MyBase is that it originated in Boomer angst. The paper is based in part on research about millennials done by Art Fritzson, a Booz Allen vice president. He was commissioned by "a senior officer who had been appalled to discover a number of junior officers using the . . . Facebook Web site for the purpose of organizing their. squadrons" This according to a piece Fritzson wrote along with Lloyd W. Howell Jr., another Booz V.P., and Dov S. Zakheim, a former Defense comptroller now at Booz. Their March 10 report, "Military of Millennials" appears on Booz' Web site, strategy + business. The authors point out that Generation Y, born between 1980 and 2001, is just about as large as the baby boom, lives on the Internet, and views knowledge not as power, but as something that "belongs to everyone and creates a basis for building new relationships and fostering dialogue. . . . They have grown up seeing the thoughts reaction, and even indiscretions of their friends and peers posted on a permanent, universally accessible global record."

Yes, this does call for a more creative approach to security and the need for adult supervision, but it also makes for a multi-tasking, anti-hierarchy, adaptive group that might just be uniquely suited to defeating the loosley organized, highly networked enemies we face, as well as the elusive, multi-faceted challenges we must surmount.

And by the way, the millennials also turn out to be deeply committed to family, community and teamwork; hugely civic-minded, creative and independent and possibly the most tolerant generation on record. So what if all this comes in a wrapping of tattoos, piercings and baggy clothes? We drove our elders nuts in our time, too.

Not long from now, we will make laws, set policies, write regulations and create programs by first "playing" the likely consequences in synthetic worlds, says Anne Laurent, longtime observer of federal management and creator, just this year, of a new blog, “The Agile Mind.”

Laurent has written and edited for Government Executive for 12 years and did the same for Federal Times for 10 years before that. Now, she is blazing a new trail both in journalism and government, exploring how new human-computer interfaces, gaming, virtual worlds and other innovations will reshape the way agencies function and the way we explain what they do and how they do it.

Laurent has written recently for Tech Insider about NASA and other agencies venturing into synthetic worlds such as Second Life. She has written for Government Executive about the Defense Department’s increasing use of gaming software for training, and about the Army’s move into private virtual worlds.

On “The Agile Mind,” she's weaving all these trends and others into a vision of a virtual government in which, she writes:

We will interact with all kinds of data--program results, claims processed, rates of environmental change, response times, performance, cost, schedule, etc.--physically via wall-sized multi-touch screens and computer tables, not keyboards and monitors.

Displaying and manipulating on one large screen both live and historical information about the past and current conditions and the effects of agency actions will allow us to see trends and possibilities and make predictions in ways we simply cannot today, when information resides in silos and behind the walls of very different organizations and is static and lifeless. Most of what we do digitally will involve touching and moving images or actually stepping into situations via our digital doubles--avatars--in uncannily accurate models of the real world.

For a sneak peak at the future, she points out, we need only turn to CNN, which began using a multi-touch computer wall as a news broadcasting tool on Jan. 2. Or visit NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Second Life. Or test the online game, “America’s Army,” the hugely popular recruiting tool. Or join the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds.

Laurent suggests that gaming and synthetic worlds and visualization and ubiquitous computing will become commonplace in government because the next generation of politicians and employees will expect and demand it. "These people will not, cannot, manage information on paper, or in spreadsheets or online dashboards," she writes. "They will not endure the kludgy, slow, inefficient process of learning new software and keeping that knowledge up to date merely to be able to manipulate data. . . . They will demand to see and touch and manipulate what is known about problems and to 'play' possible solutions so they can view the likely outcomes before choosing how to proceed."

It’s a beguiling vision filled with promise and peril. Laurent is an able and engaging chronicler of it.