Viva Intellipedia!

ARTICLE: For Intelligence Officers, A Wiki Way to Connect Dots, By Steve Vogel, Washington Post, August 27, 2009

Main idea:

Intellipedia is a collaborative online intelligence repository, and it runs counter to traditional reluctance in the intelligence community to the sharing of classified information. Indeed, it still meets with formidable resistance from many quarters of the 16 agencies that have access to the system.

But the site, which is available only to users with proper government clearance, has grown markedly since its formal launch in 2006 and now averages more than 15,000 edits per day. It's home to 900,000 pages and 100,000 user accounts.

To me, this is the best type of intelligence reform and the sort of intra-community collaboration we should have had all along. We are super-empowering analysts and killing ORCON (originator-controlled).

Comments

[David Sutton]

Think I have mentioned this article before Tom but check out Thinking Straight Talking Straight: Problems of Intelligence Analysis” by Douglas Hart and Steven Simon.

Looked at it for critical review a few subjects back, they have some great ideas, similar to the wiki style open source collaborative methodology.

What scares me is that the people who need to be talking to one another sometimes can't for the most ridiculous reasons. Australia's domestic security org cannot email Australia's external Intel org because of firewall issues.