handshake

Finally, my laborious labor has produced something I can show outside of work. For the past few months, I’ve been working on a project that’s looking into using social networking to connect folks at MITRE to the people we work with on the outside – sponsors, research partners, vendors, etc. Sure, we have some tools now, but they’re either email-based or just too heavy-duty due to security regulations. We needed something more persistent but at the same time more open, and a social network may just fit the bill. Why do I say “may”? Well, that’s the whole point – we’re prototyping an approach, and if it doesn’t meet our needs, at least we’ll at least know why.

So anyhoo, after searching far and wide, the team established that we needed our own environment (sorry Ning/Facebook/LinkedIn, you ain’t getting our data!) We picked Elgg, an open-source platform that so far has been working reasonably well for us. The biggest problem I’ve faced on the user experience side, however, is that Elgg is endlessly expandable with plugins written by the open-source community – and those plugins are endlessly inconsistent. Just getting something that could pass for a reasonable navigation scheme took a few Stan-years... and I’m still not done.

Since this is a research project, we’ve had an equivalent of 1 - 1.5 full-time developers working on it, which meant I had to get my hands dirty with PHP - and actually, that felt strangely liberating. Normally, I’m working with locked-down COTS products, where even the smallest change takes. With this Elgg-based thing, everything is up for grabs.

Our baby, christened “Handshake”, is out on https://handshake.mitre.org. Check it out, although there’s only so much “checking out” you can do without being invited by a MITRE employee. If you’re interested, shoot me an email, and I’ll pull you in.