The Starfish Irregular Warfare Education and Training Portal
I’d like to share a site I’ve been poking around lately (and adding material to its library) with SWJ readership — as well as encourage our community of interest and practice to help grow this relatively new joint initiative.
The Starfish Irregular Warfare Education and Training portal is a globally accessible, web-based community of interest maintained by U.S. Joint Forces Command. It was founded on principles followed by other successful COIs such as Intellipedia. Small Wars Journal / Council was also used as a model and provided advice.
Getting started is a two step process — registration at HARMONEWeb.org (“Request Membership” or sign in if already a member) and then registration (via Joint Knowledge Online) at the Starfish Irregular Warfare Education and Training portal. The second step is not instantaneous as it requires approval from the site’s administrator — in my case (requested during normal working hours) it took less than a couple of hours before my approval e-mail with password was received.
Information from the Starfish factsheet follows:
Starfish seeks to create a collaborative and leaderless education and training platform that fosters cross-community sharing of IW best practices, lessons learned, research, lesson plans and curricula. Starfish encourages active participation from multinational partners, the interagency community and academia, realizing that it, like many other successful web-based COIs, will require the cooperation from professional military education institutions, the combatant commands, the services and individual warfighters with past and recent IW experience.
Three active worksites reside within the Starfish portal:
Education worksite: A collaborative forum for developing IW learning and for challenging doctrine, best ideas and processes from inside and outside the Department of Defense establishment.
Training worksite: A collaborative forum for IW training development to support operations and programmatic training initiatives.
Irregular Warfare Training Community of Interest (IW TCOI) worksite: An organizational point for the IW TCOI’s monthly meetings, which provide a venue for collaboration and coordination among the training community on relevant IW training related issues pertaining to the execution of current and future military operations.
Current technical capabilities include: Document libraries, internal resource library, discussion forums, blog, teleconferencing and chat, and key links.
