The NY Times magazine published a piece last December [free log-on required] describing how web 2.0 applications are revolutionising information sharing in the US intelligence community. It’s a must-read. Here’s a taster:
In the fall of 2005, [two evangelists for better use of open source information in the intelligence community] 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… 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 attack.
On which note, here’s an excerpt from an email being forwarded all over the place:
The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is pleased to invite you to the “DNI Open Source Conference 2007: Expanding the Horizons” to be held in Washington, DC, on Monday, 16 July and Tuesday, 17 July, 2007. The conference is free and open to the public.
