ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

Elliot Masie’s newsletter today highlighted a fascinating article written by an analyst in the CIA about the experimental use of Wikis, Blogs and other “community knowledge” tools in the Intelligence arena. The article is (“The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community” by Dr D. Calvin Andrus - Central Intelligence Agency). Of particular interest to me is the comparison Andrus made between blogs and wikis and the need for three wrapper technologies (repository, search and feedback). Here’s an extract:

“US policy-makers, war-fighters, and law-enforcers now operate in a real-time worldwide decision and implementation environment. The rapidly changing circumstances in which they operate take on lives of their own, which are difficult or impossible to anticipate or predict. The only way to meet the continuously unpredictable challenges ahead of us is to match them with continuously unpredictable changes of our own. We must transform the Intelligence Community into a community that dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as the national security environment changes.

“RECENT THEORETICAL developments in the philosophy of science that matured in the 1990’s, collectively known as Complexity Theory, suggest changes the community should make to meet this challenge. These changes include allowing our officers more autonomy in the context of improved tradecraft and information sharing. In addition, several new technologies will facilitate this transformation. Two examples are self-organizing knowledge websites, known as Wikis, and information sharing websites known as Blogs. Allowing Intelligence Officers and our nonintelligence National Security colleagues access to these technologies on SIPRNet, will provide a critical mass to begin the transformation…

“The Wiki and the Blog are complementary companion technologies that together form the core workspace that will allow intelligence officers to share, innovate, adapt, respond, and be—on occasion—brilliant. Blogs will cite Wiki entries. The occasional brilliant blog comment will shape the Wiki. The Blog will be vibrant, and make many sea [of] changes in real-time. The Wiki, as it matures, will serve as corporate knowledge and will not be as fickle as the Blog. The Wiki will be authoritative in nature, while the Blog will be highly agile. The Blog is personal and opinionated. The Wiki is agreed-upon and corporate.

“The Wiki and Blog, however, while standing together, cannot stand by themselves. Intelligence officers need a wellspring of intelligence from which to build the Wiki and about which to comment in the Blog. Such a wellspring would be a community-wide intelligence repository patterned after DIA’s SAFE or CIA’s CIRAS. These repositories are largely disordered, out-ofcontext piles of cables. That is okay. The intelligence repository is like unrefined ore. (The repository could actually be many federated databases.) The Blog and the Wiki serve as successive refining processes for the unrefined ore in the intelligence repository. The Blog would vet, comment, and establish context for the intelligence. This extracted intelligence knowledge from the intelligence repository would be placed in the well-organized Wiki. Both the Wiki and the Blog would link back to authoritative source documents in the repository.

“While an intelligence repository is required “under” the Wiki and the Blog, two more technologies are required “above” them. One is a search technology and the other is a feedback technology. Part of the agility required in today’s high-speed national security environment is to be able to quickly find information. One needs the ability to search for specific knowledge within or across the Wiki, or the Blog, or the Intelligence Repository in a Google-like (www.google.com) fashion.

“While most intelligence officers are quite familiar with search technology, we are less acquainted with feedback technologies. These technologies are often in and of themselves self-organizing. For example, we might want to know which cables in the repository were most cited by the Blog over the last 24 hours. This feedback lets the visitor quickly know what the community thinks is important. It also lets the originator of the cable understand its impact. Feedback technologies let visitors know what areas of the Wiki are changing most rapidly as an indicator of newly vetted knowledge. Feedback technologies can utilize subscription techniques such as “send me an alert when more than 10 people have read my blog.”

“Wikipedia.org makes extensive use of these feedback technologies on its homepage. Another feedback Internet site (www.daypop.com) has dozens of real-time lists–from the top words to the top blog postings to and the top sources cited. Its Top 40 list not only gives the current ranking but whether the ranking is going up or down.

“Feedback technologies are an integral part of the solution suggested by Complexity Theory. As important as information sharing is to the success of the solution, it is even more important to know who is sharing what information. This allows intelligence officers to accurately understand where they are in the intellectual space of the intelligence community. It also allows intelligence officers to see what gaps exist and where changes need to be made. The feedback technologies allow an agile reading of the current state of play across the wide expanse of the Repository, the Wiki, and the Blog.

“Together, these five technologies (Repository, Wiki, Blog, Search, Feedback), would allow the community to start down the path of implementing the five mission recommendations (self organization, tradecraft, information sharing, feedback, and strategic communication) suggested by Complexity Theory.”