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 Collaborative Virtual Workspace Provides Valuable “Lessons Learned” Deb Ercolini, Consulting Author The Collaborative Virtual Workspace (CVW) software began as an idea for a new way to work together across locations. The road from concept development to deployment by the public provides many lessons regarding technology transfer and technology development.
CVW began as a MITRE-sponsored research project. The developers gave no thought to technology transfer at the time, as they did not imagine that their "idea generator" would become more than a demonstrable proof of concept. When it became clear that the value of CVW warranted the sharing of MITRE-developed source code, the developers recognized that many of the third-party products upon which it was built had been acquired under licensing restrictions that prohibited us from giving it away. To promote innovation and the maturation of CVW technology within our sponsor base, the developers had to write out some of that third-party source code and re-license the rest in a way that permitted sharing it. Eventually, challenges associated with developing and sharing CVW, even under the most favorable licensing agreements, proved too restrictive, and the project was reconceived and redeveloped under the Open Source paradigm and released in April 1999. Thus, we were able to develop and distribute "bundled" software without restriction. The technological advantages to this arrangement included the ability to engage industry and government in maturing both operational concepts and actual software in response to real-world demands. One sponsor in particular (a national intelligence organization) quickly put CVW into widespread use to support world-wide operations. This was both a blessing and a curse. On the positive side, adopting CVW and its concepts changed forever the way that the organization does business. On the negative side, CVW usage raised many concerns about how to sustain the software in the long run. Third-party maintenance contractors were brought on board, various ideas were considered, and in the end the intel organization went with a software system built with commercial-off-the-shelf products that possessed many of the same basic features as CVW. While this solution worked and solved the sustainment question, it required a large investment on the part of the organization. MITRE's lesson-learned was that having a technology transition plan from the start of the project would have eased these growing pains. Our goals in licensing CVW as an Open Source tool were to reap new ideas from other developers, expand on CVW ideas, and stimulate the marketplace to create commercially available products to benefit our sponsors. This didn't happen in the way we imagined it would. In our Open Source licensing agreement for CVW, we included the stipulation that there would be an open exchange of non-proprietary information among all developers. Another stipulation prohibited anyone from selling CVW-based products back to the government, which retains unrestricted rights to the results of the research it funds. We learned, however, that these restrictions were not in line with a business marketplace that focuses on product revenue dollars. In the end, while CVW enjoyed many downloads as an Open Source program, no one picked it up and developed it further. This is a risk that all developers take when they use Open Source to transfer their ideas to the public. Some ideas are picked up and advanced, some are not. We thought it was important for CVW's future to distinguish our role as researcher from industry's role as developer and supporter of products and so decided to move CVW entirely into the public domain where it would not be owned by anyone. In November 2000, we changed the CVW license and moved CVW from a MITRE Web site to a third-party site—the SourceForge server—a nonprofit, collaborative Web site that provides a means for storing, publishing, and updating free and Open Source software. This move led four commercial entities to leverage our work by providing training for CVW, deploying and supporting CVW, using CVW as an environment for continuing research of collaborative systems, or using CVW as a proof-of-concept. Looking back, it's easy to see that the transfer would have gone more smoothly if we had developed a technology transfer plan at the outset of our CVW work, and if we'd begun transferring the technology at an earlier stage. However, after going through the ups and downs of the technology transfer process, we now have the satisfaction of seeing CVW being used for the benefit of the public. It remains on the SourceForge site and we continue to field questions and comments. All the while we have taken CVW through concept development, software coding and debugging, documentation, and Open Source information sharing, we have kept our focus on our charter as a federally funded research and development center to “act in the public interest.” The concepts that MITRE pioneered with CVW now form the basis of many successful collaboration tools used in commercial, government, and academic environments. |
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CVW
is a collaboration software environment that provides a "virtual
building" where teams can "meet," communicate, collaborate,
and share information, regardless of the team members' geographic locations.
It enables virtual co-location through persistent virtual rooms, each
incorporating the people, information, and tools appropriate to a task,
operation, or service. CVW allows users to communicate with one another
using chatrooms, audio, video, and online whiteboards. CVW also has presence-detection
capabilities, i.e., a user can see who is online and if they are active.
CVW's many important technical features made it one of the most advanced
virtual workspaces available when MITRE created it in 1998.