Yet to read the full piece, but the first page is fascinating. Can't wait to read the rest!
Well now, that I have read it, I believe the proponents of classified wikis in the intelligence community have it right. I also believe that it will be an uphill battle in the short term for them to succeed. Over time I believe the 'young turks' of intelligence will increase in numbers and the institution will rapidly reach a tipping point where this form of collaborative analysis will succeed.
My bias is that wikis work, particularly in a closed environment where authorship and editing is not anonymous. The best wikis come with accountability and responsibility from the participants. Here's a link to an abstract of the proposal in 2005 by Andrus.
Yes, this is a fascinating story and I'm pleased as punch that our intelligence agencies are blogging and have made a Wiki tool (Intellipedia) work:
"...Fingar and Wertheimer are now testing whether a wiki could indeed help analysts do their job. In the fall of 2005, they joined forces with C.I.A. wiki experts to build a prototype of something called Intellipedia, a wiki that any intelligence employee with classified clearance could read and contribute to. To kick-start the content, C.I.A. analysts seeded it with hundreds of articles from nonclassified documents like the C.I.A. World Fact Book. In April, they sent out e-mail to other analysts inviting them to contribute, and sat back to see what happened."
"By this fall, more than 3,600 members of the intelligence services had contributed a total of 28,000 pages. Chris Rasmussen, a 31-year-old Â?knowledge managementÂ? engineer at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, spends part of every day writing or editing pages. Rasmussen is part of the younger generation in the intelligence establishment that is completely comfortable online; he regularly logs into a sprawling, 50-person chat room with other Intellipedians, and he alsblogsgs about his daily work for all other spies to read. He told me the usefulness of Intellipedia proved itself just a couple of months ago, when a small two-seater plane crashed into a Manhattan building. An analyst created a page within 20 minutes, and over the next two hours it was edited 80 times by employees of nine different spy agencies, as news trickled out. Together, they rapidly concluded the crash was not a terrorist act. Â?In the intelligence community, there are so many Â?Stay off the grassÂ? signs,Â? Rasmussen said. Â?But here, youÂ?re free to do what you want, and it works.Â?"
"Yet Intellipedia also courts the many dangers of wikis Â? including the possibility of error. WhatÂ?s to stop analysts from posting assertions that turn out to be false? Fingar admits this will undoubtedly happen. But if there are enough people looking at an entry, he says, there will always be someone to catch any grave mistakes. Rasmussen notes that though there is often strong disagreement and debate on Intellipedia, it has not yet succumbed to the sort of vandalism that often plagues Wikipedia pages, including the posting of outright lies. This is partly because, unlike with Wikipedia, Intellipedia contributors are not anonymous. Whatever an analyst writes on Intellipedia can be traced to him. Â?If you demonstrate youÂ?ve got something to contribute, hey, the expectation is youÂ?re a valued member,Â? Fingar said. Â?You demonstrate youÂ?re an idiot, that becomes known, too.Â?
"For something like Intellipedtrafficsh, which trafficks in genuinely serious intelligence, hard decisions had to be made about what risks were acceptable. Fingar says that deeply sensitive intel would never be allowed onto Intellipedia Â? particularly if it was operational information about a mission, like a planned raid on a terrorist compound. Indeed, MeyerroseÂ?s office is building three completely separate versions of Intellipedia for each of the three levels of secrecy: Top Secret, Secret and Unclassified. Each will be placed on a data network configured so that only people with the correct level of clearance can see them Â? and these networks are tightly controlled, so sensitive information typed into the Top Secret Intellipedia cannot accidentally leak into the Unclassified one."
"...A spy blogosphere, even carefully secured against intruders, might be fundamentally incompatible with the goal of keeping secrets. And the converse is also true: blogs and wikis are unlikely to thrive in an environment where people are guarded about sharing information. Social software doesnÂ?t work if people arenÂ?t social.
Virtually all proponents of improved spy sharing are aware of this friction, and they have few answers. Meyerrose has already strained at boundaries that make other spies deeply uneasy. During the summer, he set up a completely open chat board on the Internet and invited anyone interested to participate in a two-week-long discussion of how to improve the spy agenciesÂ? policies for acquiring new technology."
Then, of course, there's the culture to be considered. The culture of an organization is the critical factor, in my opinion, determining whether a different way of doing things can succeed or the pace at which change happens. 'Better' is not exclusively a rational choice, but an emotional and cultural one.
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