DoD embracing crowd-sourcing more and more
Tuesday, August 21, 2012 at 11:01AM 
From a WSJ story of a few days back:
A branch of the Pentagon is looking into whether a bunch of volunteers could design a better amphibious vehicle for the Marines than a defense contractor.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa, is preparing to assess whether crowdsourcing, a freewheeling collaborative method sometimes used to develop software, can be an effective means of designing military equipment.
The U.S. military hopes crowdsourcing could help counter the enormous costs and long delays that often dog the development of new weaponry and vehicles.
Darpa aims to use crowdsourcing to tap more brainpower than the traditional defense-contractor route . . .
That dovetails with the positive response that Wikistrat has recently received from the Defense Department. Facing an era of wanting to do as much or more with far fewer resources, DoD is proving to be very receptive to the Wikistrat pitch. It's all about not relying on the same small crowd of contractors and working to get up to globalization speed, because that's the velocity at which all our enemies act and events unfold.
Reader Comments (1)
I understand that the DOD wants to cut expenses and benefit from global rich and diverse opinions, but the question is: wouldn’t that be against the best interest of the U.S. Department of Defense?
In other words, the wikistrat doesn’t represent an official department of any country; it is an independent strategic think tank and its clients and their projects and kept undisclosed. This is part of its success as a new trend in strategic research and planning.
The DOD on the other hand, represents the government of the United States and thus it reflects the way the US is thinking and the trajectory of its future planning. Using the mechanism of the wikistrat by such sensitive agency of the US means exposing its strategies, plans, issues of concerns to many international actors, whether states (such as China, Russia, and Iran) or international organizations (such as al-Qaeda, and other extremists). There is no way to know the true identities, affiliations, orientations and intentions of the people setting behind the computer and participating in the strategic website. But those people will know what’s on the mind of the DOD.
So, wouldn’t applying such mechanism by the DARPA expose the DOD plans to competitors?