FORGE.MIL

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FORGE.MIL: A collaborative environment to accelerate the development and deployment of dependable softaware and services within the Department of Defense

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DoD CAC or ECA Certificate Required

Forge.mil is a family of services provided to support the DoD's technology development community. The system currently enables the collaborative development and use of open source and DoD community source software. These initial software development capabilities are growing to support the full system life-cycle and enable continuous collaboration among all stakeholders including developers, testers, certifiers, operators, and users.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

 

What is the Forge.mil Program?

Forge.mil is a DISA-led activity designed to improve the ability of the U.S. Department of Defense to rapidly deliver dependable software, services and systems in support of net-centric operations and warfare. Forge.mil will:

  • Enable cross-program sharing of software, system components, and services
  • Promote early and continuous collaboration among all stakeholder (e.g., developers, material providers, testers, operators, and users) throughout the development life-cycle
  • Rapidly deliver effective and efficient development and test capabilities for DoD technology development efforts
  • Help protect the operational environment from potentially harmful systems and services
  • Encourage modularity so that large programs to be developed, fielded, and operated as a set of independent components that can evolve and mature at their own rates
  • Eliminate duplicative testing and improve dependability by adopting common test and evaluation criteria supported by standard testing tools and methods

The Forge.mil effort started development in October 2008 and the first capability, SoftwareForge, is now available for limited, unclassified use.

What is SoftwareForge?

SoftwareForge is the first component of Forge.mil to be deployed. SoftwareForge enables the collaborative development and distribution of open source software and DoD community source software. For open source and community source development projects within the DoD, SoftwareForge provides software development tools such as software version control, bug tracking, requirements management, and release packaging along with collaboration tools such as wikis, discussion forums, and document repositories to enable collaborative development amongst distributed developers. SoftwareForge is currently built on the open source Subversion version control system and CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise application lifecycle management tool.

Forge.mil is currently in beta with limited operational availability. General availability for unclassified use is scheduled for Spring 2009.

What are the guidelines for participating?

Participation guidelines will vary depending on which Forge.mil capabilities (software, project, standards, certification) a user or project is utilizing. The initial capability now available is SoftwareForge a collaborative development capability for the DoD that is modeled on popular Internet-based open source software development sites.

This system will host development projects that provide opportunity for reuse and common code maintenance. The only license categories allowed for such projects are DoD community source, and certain Open Source licenses. All aspects of the project will be publicly viewable, but edit access to the project's code repository and some features will be limited to the 'authorized committer' and 'project admin' roles.

Projects on SoftwareForge will be required to maintain 'public' view access, and will be encouraged to allow contributions from all interested parties. The goal of the site is to encourage collaboration around development and maintenance activities of these projects. This should naturally lead to more individuals becoming 'authorized committers' after they have shown they have valuable contributions to make.

For a more detailed description of the 'authorized committer' model, please see the information available on the 'Producing Open Source Software' site.

How can I get access to Forge.mil?

Forge.mil is available to U.S. military, DoD government civilians and DoD contractors for Government authorized use. Access to Forge.mil requires a valid DoD Common Access Card (CAC) or a PKI certificate issues by a DoD approved External Certificate Authority (ECA).

ECA Certificates are obtained directly from the approved vendors. You may purchase an ECA Certificate from:

Operational Research Consultants, Inc. (ORC)
http://www.eca.orc.com/
Email: ecahelp@orc.com
Phone: 800.816.5548

Verisign, Inc.
https://eca.verisign.com/
Email: eca-support@verisign.com
Phone: 650.426.3224

IdenTrust, Inc. (formerly DST)
http://www.identrust.com/certificates/eca/index.html
Email: helpdesk@identrust.com
Phone: 888.882.1104

For more information on the DoD PKI and ECA program please go to DISA's Information Assurance Support Environment (IASE).

What capabilities are available in the system?

The first deployed system within Forge.mil (SoftwareForge) provides a set of integrated tools for project and idea collaboration, including source control (subversion), wikis, document storage, tasks, trackers, file release areas, and discussion forums. The system also allows for the easy association of artifact data within each of these individual tools. For example, you can associate a particular tracker artifact (defect) with a particular code checkin in the source control system.

More examples and an overview of the toolset can be found in the CollabNet SourceForge Video Overview.

Who do I contact to get more information?

You can obtain more information by emailing your request to: webmaster@forge.mil.

Why do I get a warning that there is a problem with this website's security certificate?

A certificate is a digital document providing the identity of a website or individual. The trustworthiness of any PKI certificate is only as good as the dependability and trustworthiness of the authority who issued the certificate. When you receive this error, your browser is warning you that the certificate, for the site that your attempting to access, has not been issued by an authority trusted by your browser. Web browsers come preloaded with a set of certificate authorities that the developer of the browser believes to be trustworthy. Unfortunately, the DoD PKI Certificate Authority (CA) is often not on this list.

The certificates that identify Forge.mil have been issued by the DoD CA. In order for your browser to recognize the DoD CA as a trustworthy certificate provider, you must have the DoD PKI Root Certificate installed in your browser. Once this root certificate is installed, your browser will recognize the DoD CA as a trusted authority and accept the Forge.mil PKI certificates without warnings.

Visit the following page to download the DoD/ECA Root Certificates: https://www.dodpke.com/InstallRoot.

I was recently issued a new CAC or ECA certification and can no longer access my information?

Mapping your new certificate to your existing Forge.mil account requires support from the Forge.mil help desk. Please send a message with your request to webmaster@forge.mil.

 

 

 

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