Comments on: Intelligence agencies share information via Intellipedia wiki

By: W. David Stephenson blogs on homeland security et al.

W. David Stephenson blogs on homeland security et al. — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 19:03:40 +0000

Wikis gaining mainstream attention as collaboration tool…

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By: Jesse Wilson

Jesse Wilson — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 01:37:14 +0000

This is a huge step in the right direction for the Intelligence Community. There has been on-going discussion, commissions, and recommendations for the Intelligence Community to act like a community–the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing–and this has the potential to help. One major problem is recommendations from the 9/11 Commission Report on sharing don’t trickle down to where the actual analysts are because of massive bureaucracy. Even after the Intelligence Reform & Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, President Bush’s Executive Order to “Strengthen the Sharing of Terrorism Information,” and the first ever “National Intelligence Strategy” released by Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, the IC is having a hard time switching over to a share-centric community and utilizing collaborative tools. This is partly due to the old-mindset and secretive culture spread out though the community. But changes such as Intellipedia are needed.

We now live in a real-time world, with rapidly changing circumstances. We must transform ourselves into an adaptive enterprise, escaping the stovepipes naturally created by hierarachy organizations. Wikis allow persons in a community-of-interest to “swarm” around issues in a network fashion, allowing people to escape these barriers naturally created by bureaucratic organizations, and promotes real-time analysis to respond to the increasingl interdependent time senstive world.

We need to congratulate the DNI for taking this huge step in the right direction, and those in the IC who are willing to break the old-mindset and culture, and give it a try.

By: SteveA

SteveA — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 16:00:42 +0000

I think this is a great step forward for our intelligence community. It replaces all the old systems of information gathering in a way that opens it up to the whole community for research and the addition of information.

I feel some of your concerns, while well founded, are not well thought through.

Some of the issues the Wikipedia has encountered, and that form the basis for your concerns, are ones that were not identified at the beginning (not everything can be thought of), and for which a good solution must evolve.

By making the system closed to specific people (those in the intelligence community), they limit the users and can have tighter control over the community rules for the Wiki. This partially solves the issue of suppressing dissenting views. By making it a community rule that dissenting views must not be removed it helps create a dialog on the subject for those doing research to read concerns of both sides, and see if any of the discussion actually helps them in their research for a specific subject. One can only hope that these people have the good intention of increasing the knowledge of the community, and those with the “compartmentalized” views will be weeded out of the community as harmful to the efforts.

Of course this Wiki will have its own growing pains, but the fact that they went as far as to create it shows they may have an understanding that this will occur. I feel the initial selection of those with access leaving out congress, the president, etc. was a good idea. They will only further politicize issues the Wiki may encounter before those issues can be found and worked on. Hopefully, eventually, they will feel it safe to allow these political players to have access to the Wiki as a source of information (god forbid they get editor rights!).