1. Business. When Facebook crossed the 100 million member mark last year, I began to explore and experiment with its features (wall, notes, links, photos, tagging, videos, events, groups, pages, etc.) and numerous third-party apps, with the intention of teaching them during my Web 2.0 workshops at NTU’s Center for Continuing Education.
   
   As Mari Simith of WhyFacebook.com put it, it’s a great place for promoting business: “Meet your peers. Find business contacts. Instant gate opener. Build relationships. Raise visibility. Develop your personal brand. Target your niche. Get rapid top Google placement. Place targeted ads. No cost marketing.” (See also: Tom Lindstrom’s Myspace Marketing Tips.)
2. Ease of Use. Its interface is clean and uncluttered. If you know how to use Windows, you would know how to use Facebook. All you need is time (or a quick overview session) to discover its numerous features and third-party apps.
3. Usefulness. Facebook interfaces seamlessly with hundreds (or thousands?) of useful third-party apps. These include popular Web 2.0 apps such as Twitter, Slideshare, Digg, Delicious, and Skype. My current favorite is the Philosophers + Philosophy app developed by Dr John Abbate from the University of Melbourne. It’s a marvellous way to add my favorite quotes and to discover the ideas of a new philosopher everyday.
4. Lost Contacts. I found long-lost friends/colleagues (and they found me) through the “People You May Know” tool.
5. New Contacts. I’ve been connecting online with very interesting people from all over the world. For example, my new online friend today is a Spanish priest in Russia!
   

   Fr Otets Burgos with the Bishop of Moscow and two children.

6. Visibility & Transparency. What I say and do online are visible to my contacts. Likewise, what they say and do online are visible to me. What this means is I can easily introduce ideas/sites/other things to them and vice versa. This means we can co-discover (learn) about one another as well as many many ideas, sites and other things!
7. Social Mission. I can easily create a Group, Page or Cause to get support for ideas that I strongly believe in, e.g. “Faith without reason is blind. Reason without faith is lame.” (See the Faith & Reason (Fides et Ratio) cause.) I can also contribute to causes that others believe in, e.g. Beth’s Birthday cause.

Asia Social Media Directory is “non-competitive” in the sense that all Singaporean bloggers and social media activists are still encouraged to add relevant info on their sites on the Singapore Social Media Directory. However all, including those from Singapore, are welcome to join the Asia Social Media Directory Frappr map:

WHY AM I DOING THIS? Basically, I want to reach out to a much wider audience, especially people in Asia. Currently, about 50% of my visitors are coming from Singapore. Too few are from the rest of Asia.

However, there is no Asian directory available on the Internet right now (at least not one that I could find on the Internet via a Google search) that is:

• “Unconditional”: All bloggers and social media activists in Asia are most welcome to join and list their blogs and/or social media sites there without having to add a reciprocal badge/link to the directory from their sites.
• Community-managed: Anyone can add themselves in without being screened first. (Of course, if abuse occurs then abusers will be barred.)

In addition, I also plan to read more Asian blogs and start providing insights and roundups on how free/open-source/social technologies are being used in Asian business and education. Reasons include:

• More and more, Singapore is being used by westerners (Europeans, Americans, Canadians, etc.) as a springboard to Asia, and by easterners (Asians) as a stepping stone to the English-speaking countries.
• Over 50% Internet users will be Asians soon

So, would Asia Social Media Directory and my finetuned focus be of interest/value to you, my readers?

According to the designers, this instrument is intended to be:

• collaborative: several performers (locally or remotely)
• intuitive: zero manual, zero instructions
• sonically challenging and interesting
• learnable and masterable, even by children
• suitable for novice and advanced electronic music (i.e. installations and concerts)

Key Features (extracted from the Zoho Notebook site itself):

• Intuitive user interface with white boarding and custom layout capability
• Quick “add” buttons for adding text, graphics, photos, audio, video, RSS feeds and documents
• Combine and add Notebook pages from other applications such as Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet
• “Content level” sharing and versioning providing fine grain control of what is shared with others
• Firefox and IE plug-ins for instant web clipping
• Real-time, simultaneous editing and sharing of content
• Skype integration for instant chat and IP telephony

Today, I’m publishing online two wiki research proposals which I’d written for a Masters in Instructional Design program at the National Institute of Education, Singapore:

• “The UTAUT and Electronic Brainstorming in a Wiki”: This proposal was written in April 2005 for “Implications of Social Psychology Theories & Research for Educators”, a module taught by Dr Angeline Khoo and Dr Lim Kam Ming. Could have worked on this as a project if not for the circumstances (long story). So, imagine my surprise upon finding a very similar project (Global Warming Student Speakout) on the Google for Educators site last October! Not sure though what the specific research questions were.
• “Mediating PBL in a Wiki environment” (1): This proposal was written in April 2005 for “MID809: Designing, Conducting, and Reporting Investigations”, a module taught by Dr Chee Kit Looi and Dr Myint Swe Khine. A revised experiment was conducted in November among two classes in a polytechnic. The results were mixed. However, due to more pressing concerns at work, the writeup for the results of this project has been placed on the backburner till now.

Looking forward to your comments, suggestions, queries, etc.

At WikiSym last August, Ward Cunningham showed some regional trends  comparing Google searches for “wiki” and “blog.” Overall, searches for “blog” (in red) steadily outpace searches for “wiki” (in blue), although the rate of growth is about the same for both… the phenomenon is reversed in Germany … [and] in Japan … At WikiWednesday this past week, PeterThoeny said that he had shown similar trends for a recent Wiki talk, and that he also showed the trends in France …

Whoa, Nellie! Apparently, the French don’t care much for Wikis. It was a shock for me to see this, as I know several stellar French members of the Wiki community and even more French-speaking members. Any thoughts as to why this might be the case?

My guess: Japanese and Germans are on the whole very cohesive people who tend to identify closely with their communities. The French, on the other hand, are generally known to be highly individualistic. Wiki collaborations are basically “corporate” or community-based. Therefore, it’s not surprising that most French people should “hate” wikis.

In Downes’ words:

“The drawing depicts the often unnoticed assumptions that inform our understanding of groups, inform our sometimes slavish devotion to groups, and shows how these contrast with my own understanding of how interaction ought to occur, in networks. It’s not just a web theory (though it is that), it is a theory about life and society in general.”

• The first reactions of many people towards RSS, blogs, wikis, Elgg, Elluminate, Furl, Moodle, etc. seem to be, “Gasp! How overwhelming!”, “Are writings in blogs (or wikis, etc.) academically rigorous?”, “Can one really use these tools to teach a real course? How?”
• Wow! I’m already quite familiar with almost all the tools that are being explored in this course — thanks to several fortuituous turns of events in my life. In fact, I now use many routinely in my daily knowledge gathering and management activities.
• However, having conducted several learning experiments among real students over the past two years, it’s still not very clear to me what the model answers are. One thing that does stand out is this: Students who already meet one another face-to-face often have very little motivation to do things online with one another. On the other hand, distance learners who study alone are very likely to be keen to interact socially, cognitively, etc. with one another. Therefore, Dr Anderson’s paper, Distance Learning — Social Softwares Killer Ap?, certainly struck a chord in me.
  

• Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text (or create documents from scratch).
• Use a simple WYSIWYG editor to format documents, spell-check them, etc.
• Invite others to share documents (by e-mail address).
• Edit documents online with whomever I hoose.
• View any document’s revision history and roll back to any version.
• Publish documents online to the world, or to just who I choose.
• Download documents to my desktop as Word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF*, HTML or zip.
• Post documents to my blog.

Afternote 05-04-2007: Shortly after posting this, I found out that the above list was actually taken from a 2005 article by Tim O’Reilly. Here’s just a note to clarify this.

According to Mr O’Reilly, characteristics of Web 2.0 include:

1. Web as Platform
2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence
3. Data is the Next Intel Inside
4. End of the Software Release Cycle
5. Lightweight Programming Models
6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device
7. Rich User Experiences

And here’s a compact definition from Wikipedia:

“Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a perceived second-generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. O’Reilly Media used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences, and it has since become widely adopted.”

• Clinfowiki: The Clinical Informatics Wiki
• RHIO Wiki: The Only Online, Real-time Forum on RHIOs and Health Information Exchanges
• Child and Youth Mental Health Wiki: A Pilot Project Wiki Sante mentale des enfants et des ados: un projet pilote
• Health Information Technology: Community of Practice Project Home Page
• Katrina Help Info: Health and Safety
• Health Informatics & elearning

Skype has been a great tool to do small Web Conferences of 5-10 people. Recently it got better with the introduction of a new moderated Skypecast Web Conferencing service. Any Skype user can now do a free live Web conferences with up to 100 persons through their client software.

All you have to do is login into the Skypecast service with your Skype ID, describe what the event is about and schedule it on the site. You can also send out invitations or announce the event on another website or a forum. Members of the community then register and participate in the live Web Conference. As a Web Conference moderator, you can pass “virtual microphone” to participants, mute, eject or encourage conversations.

CHECKED OUT Skypecasting this afternoon and learnt a few new things today.

Skypecasting is still basically text and audio conferencing, with rudimentary moderation features (as described above). However, to obtain an almost full-fledged webconferencing solution, we can easily use it with free or low-cost tools such as:

• Pamela (thanks, Gordon) or Skylook for quick voice recording: In addition, Skylook enables the user to “make Skype calls and start Skype text chats directly from Outlook 2000/XP/2003 (not Express!) contacts and emails. It shows contacts who are online in the Outlook toolbar and provides options to review contact details and review previous communications with the contact. It also records all voice calls and text chats to a special Outlook folder, allowing them to be organized and managed like email. Voice calls are recorded to MP3 attachments to these items.”
• Glance or GoToMeeting for easy screensharing — to show PowerPoint slides, use a website to share conference papers, run a poll, etc.: In Robin Good’s words, “[With Glance,] activating a new conference in which you can show whatever is going on in your screen to as many people as you like takes only two clicks… GoToMeeting is a simple tool focused on doing screen sharing and remote control in an extremely effective way. Its screen-sharing abilities are compounded by a high quality screen-sharing engine capable of adjusting automatically to different bandwidth connections while always delivering a 24-bit full color image of the screen being broadcast (many screen sharing solutions default to 256-colors).”

(See also more details on other webconferencing tools in Kollabora.)

With Miki, SocialText hopes to involve mobile professionals in real collaboration using their mobile devices, not the one- or two-word terse statements common in Blackberry usage, Mayfield (SocialText founder and CEO) said.

Early on in SocialText’s existence, one of the company’s first basic wiki products worked reasonably well on a Palm Treo device.

…Mayfield says Miki could help further the adoption of wikis because it will allow users to walk out of a meeting and keep collaborating, without dealing with the hassle of e-mail. As more and more workers find themselves using mobile devices to stay in touch, it certinaly won’t hurt.

• What is it?
• Who is doing it?
• How does it work?
• Why is it significant?
• What are the downsides?
• Where is it going?
• What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Screencasting. A screencast is a video recording of the actions on a user’s computer screen, typically with accompanying audio, distributed through RSS. Screencasts can be thought of as video podcasts. They provide a simple means to extend rich course content to anyone who might benefit from the material but cannot attend a presentation. More>>

Virtual Meetings. Virtual meetings are real-time interactions that take place over the Internet using integrated audio and video, chat tools, and application sharing. They offer a way to engage students in fully interactive, online learning experiences such as lectures, discussions, and tutoring. Many virtual meeting applications integrate with course management systems, providing students and faculty with a unified learning system including access to online meetings. More>>

Grid Computing. Grid computing uses middleware to coordinate disparate IT resources across a network, allowing them to function as a virtual whole. The goal of a computing grid, like that of the electrical grid, is to provide users with access to the resources they need, when they need them. Grids address two distinct but related needs: providing remote access to IT assets, and aggregating processing power. More>>

Collaborative Editing. Collaborative editing tools allow a group of individuals to simultaneously edit a document, see who else is working on it, and watch in real time as others make changes. As a functional hybrid of wikis and instant messaging, collaborative editing creates a new dynamic for group work and multitasking, two hallmarks of today’s learners. More>>

Instant Messaging. Instant messaging (IM) is a form of online communication that allows real-time interaction through computers or mobile devices. Although typed text remains the primary convention for IM, the technology now allows users to send images, audio and video files, and other attachments. Hundreds of millions of people use IM to stay connected. In many ways, it epitomizes the notion of the always-connected, multitasking student, sending and receiving messages at all hours, from a wide spectrum of devices, while doing several other things at the same time. IM has become such an integral part of students’ lives that many colleges and universities are working to move it beyond the social sphere into teaching and learning. More>>

Augmented Reality. Augmented reality adds information and meaning to a real object or place. Unlike virtual reality, augmented reality does not create a simulated reality. Instead, it takes a real object or space and uses technologies to add contextual data to deepen students’ understanding of it. To the extent that instructors can furnish students with a broad context for understanding the real world, students are more likely to comprehend and remember what they are learning. Through exposing students to an experiential, explorative, and authentic model of learning early in their higher education careers, augmented reality may help shift students from passive to active learning modes and thus become more successful learners. More>>

Blogs. A blog—shorthand for “Web log”—is an online collection of personal commentary and links. Blogs can be viewed as online journals to which others can respond that are as simple to use as e-mail. The simplicity of creating and maintaining blogs means they can rapidly lead to open discussions. Faculty are using blogs to express their opinions, promote dialogue in their disciplines, and support teaching and learning; students increasingly use blogs for personal expression and as course requirements. By carefully evaluating blogs’ strengths and weaknesses, educators are learning to set guidelines and expectations to maximize blogs’ instructional benefits. Structured exercises and clear goals are further enhancing the educational value of blogs. Put into practice with an understanding of their benefits and limitations, blogs are an increasingly accepted instructional technology tool. More>>

Video Blogging. A videoblog, or vlog, is a Web log (blog) that primarily utilizes video rather than text or audio. Videoblogging offers a richer experience than text blogging by combining movies, sound, still images, and text. New technologies make images and video easy to produce, so anyone with a digital camera or camera-equipped cell phone and Internet access can create a vlog. Based on the popularity of blogs and podcasts, and growing access to video tools, videoblogging is likely to increase in popularity among faculty and students. The ability to easily create video segments and quickly post them online makes videoblogs a potential tool for recording lectures, special events, and so forth. Videoblogs can also be used for personal expression and reflection. As a result, they are being incorporated into e-portfolios and presentations. The use of videoblogs for digital storytelling may be one way to encourage strong student participation in e-portfolio projects. More>>

Wikis. Wikis are Web pages that can be viewed and modified by anyone with a Web browser and Internet access. Described as a composition system, a discussion medium, and a repository, wikis support asynchronous communication and group collaboration online. Their inherent simplicity gives students direct access to their content, which is crucial in group editing or other collaborative activities. Their versioning capability allows them to illustrate the evolution of thought processes as students interact with a site and its contents. Wikis are also being used as e-portfolios, highlighting their utility as a tool for collection and reflection. They may be the easiest, most effective Web-based collaboration tool in any instructional portfolio. More>>

Podcasting. “Podcasting” refers to any software and hardware combination that permits automatic downloading of audio files to an MP3 player for listening at the user’s convenience. Part of the appeal of podcasting is the ease with which audio content can be created, distributed, and downloaded from the Web. Barriers to adoption and costs are minimal, and the tools to implement podcasts are simple and affordable. Podcasting allows education to become more portable than ever before, giving educators another way to meet today’s students where they live and learn—on the Internet and on audio players. More>>

Clickers. Interaction and engagement are often limited by class size and human dynamics (a few students may dominate the conversation while most avoid interaction). Interaction and engagement, both important learning principles, can be facilitated with clickers. Clickers can also facilitate discipline-specific discussions, small work-group cooperation, and student-student interactions. Clickers-plus well—designed questions-provide an easy-to-implement mechanism for enhancing interaction. Clicker technology enables more effective, more efficient, and more engaging education. More>>

Social Bookmarking. “7 Things You Should Know About… Social Bookmarking” addresses a community-or social-approach to identifying and organizing information on the Web. Social bookmarking involves saving bookmarks one would normally make in a Web browser to a public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. The community-driven, keyword-based classifications, known as “folksonomies,” may change how we store and find information online. More>>

The most popular web server over the past 10 years has always been FOSS-based, according to Netcraft’s statistics from Aug 1995 – Dec 2005. Apache is the #1 web server, currently with over three times the market share of its next-ranked (proprietary) competitor.

An edited extract from a FOSS primer, written by Tan Wooi Tong (2004) for the United Nations Development Programme-Asia Pacific Development Information Programme (UNDP-APDIP):

Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) is a recent phenomenon that has the potential to revolutionize the software industry. It has already gained a strong foothold in the server software segment, with a leading market share worldwide in some software categories. It is also gaining ground in desktop applications and it has been predicted that its use on the desktop will become significant in the near future.

Interest in FOSS is growing globally, particularly in developing countries…. There are clear indications that the use of FOSS in government, industry and other institutions is growing [even in developed countries] and that there will be a need for graduates familiar with FOSS.

Lower Costs, Viable Alternative to Illegal Copying. The cost of providing computing and networking hardware, and the necessary software can be daunting not only for developing countries but also for underprivileged sectors in developed countries. Educational institutions that cannot afford to pay for licensing fees may resort to using illegal copies of the proprietary software. Students, who can ill-afford the purchase of licensed copies of proprietary software, may use illegal copies to do assignments at home or on their laptop computers. With its zero or negligible cost, FOSS can lower such barriers and discourage piracy tremendously. Unlike proprietary software, there is also no licensing fee for each user or computer. FOSS can be freely distributed once a copy is downloaded or made available on a CD-ROM.

Reliability, Performance and Security. Many studies have suggested that FOSS, especially more mature ones, have better reliability, performance and security. For example, FOSS database MySQL has six times fewer defects than proprietary databases (Reasoning Inc.), FOSS file server Samba running on GNU/Linux significantly outperforms Windows 20003 by about 100% (PC Magazine, 2002) and more (IT Week Labs, 2003). The development methodology, the availability of the source code and the large numbers of developers enables bugs, performance glitches and security vulnerabilities to be identified and resolved quickly by third parties. An independent audit of code is also possible only with FOSS and not with proprietary software.

Learning, Innovating and Verifying. The open philosophy of FOSS is consistent with academic freedom and the open dissemination of knowledge and information common in academia. Unlike most proprietary software, the source code in FOSS is available for users to examine and to modify. This gives students the opportunity to learn from studying high quality real-life programmes. An academic environment where FOSS is prevalent will encourage staff and students to tinker and experiment with, and participate in the development of FOSS that may eventually lead to innovative solutions. In addition, the validity of research findings arrived using FOSS can be verified, because the source code is available for examination.

(See also “Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FOSS)? Look at the Numbers!” by David A. Wheeler (2005).)

…it’s easy-to-use and practically free wikis that proponents say offer the promise of collaboration beyond e-mail, even though big editing kinks remain and other quirks and security flaws are sure to surface. Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. At Ann Arbor (Mich.)-based Soar Technology Inc., an artificial-intelligence company that works on projects for the Office of Naval Research, wikis enable the company to slash in half the time it takes to complete projects. Soar engineer Jacob Crossman says that’s because the wikis eliminate the usual flurry of back-and-forth attachments and resulting document-version confusion that’s rife in e-mail. At Dresdner, Rangaswami says that among the earliest and most aggressive adopters, e-mail volume on related projects is down 75%; meeting times have been whacked in half.

GREAT NEWS TO ME, given that my Masters thesis is on wikis. At the same time, since Dresdner is a Socialtext customer, the BusinessWeek report also sounds like a follow-up on one of the corporate wiki’s customer webpages:

1UP.com, the gaming division of Ziff Davis Media, one of the largest technology magazine publishers in the United States, has been a Socialtext customer for one year. 1UP.com was created to consolidate the online activities of several leading magazines. New General Manager Tom Jessiman sought an efficient and effective alternative to email and attachments as a way of working together.

This customer case study shows how use rapidly evolved from strategic planning to day-to-day coordination and communications, supported the brainstorming and launch of a new product and has led to promising experiments in group writing. Using Socialtext Workspace for group communications has reduced email volume dramatically to result in soft cost savings in excess of $1 million per year for a 50 person team. Project communication accelerated the project cycle of a four-month project by a month.

The initial reason for adopting Socialtext was as a substitute for group communication by email and attachments. When General Manager Tom Jessiman started the job he noticed, “a lot of confusion using email, well over 100 group emails a day, which was unwieldy, even nightmarish. Nobody knew what was the latest version of an attachment, everything was lost in inboxes and you had to data-mine your emails to find anything.”

Dear Learning & Training Colleague,

You have watched me, as reader of Learning TRENDS, experiment my way through the design of a very different event, Learning 2005, over the past 12 months. (Me: “It has been truly interesting to watch.”)

In just 3 days, I’ll have the incredible honor of welcoming 1,500 learning colleagues from two dozen countries around the world to the start of a very different type of “conference”. We changed a lot of assumptions during the design process and I wanted to share those with you, as a personal reflection:

• Focus on conversations and dialogues rather than presentation. People want to have focused and meaningful conversations with peers.
• Take away the overhead projectors in most sessions and limit facilitators to one slide. As slides go up and lights go down, interaction and engagement go down.
• Don’t solicit a RFP for presentations, rather reach out to colleagues and ask them to lead a conversation or kick off a case study. Inviting gets a much different and richer level of participation vs. the same people presenting the same stuff at all events in our field.
• Drop the trade show. Put supplier materials in a backpack and create some one hour face to face case study sessions. Paid participants don’t want to be forced into the trade show. Exhibitors are frustrated with that format. And, over 78 top suppliers signed on as sponsors and are coming as learners, as well.
• Ask people to do something rather than just listen. So, we are creating 24 communities and 12 task forces.
• Shift from keynote presentations to interactive interviews with 15 thought leaders, like Malcolm Gladwell and Marshall Goldsmith. Speakers love being able to interact with a host, the audience and each other. I will bring Steve Johnson back on the stage to mull the future with Malcolm.
• Use technology for an Extreme Learning Experience:

• RSS Feeds of all content.
• PodCasts for three months before and three months afterwards.
• Social Networking System to make new colleagues.
• Put all content into an open wiki and allow participants to evolve the session focus.
• Give everyone a radio interactive device to carry around.
• Leverage SMS Text Messaging.
• Have a dozen bloggers throughout the event, documenting it all live.
• Create a Jam Band with two dozen music oriented colleagues.
• Place all content in the public domain, using the Creative Commons License.
• Build a virtual world called LearnLand to experiment withe 3D Learning.
• Honor the need to revitalize the classroom rather than replace it. Invite Bob Pike and others to dream about the future of the classroom.
• Create the entire event as a Sandbox, with a spirit that says let’s experiment and most will succeed, some will change and some might fail. Learning innovations requires that risk.

I have learned so much during this past year. I am moved that 1,500 of you will be in Orlando starting on Sunday. I know that dozens more will decide at the last minute to join us at Learning 2005 and we will welcome you at the door. And, I appreciate that the 60,000 readers of Learning TRENDS can be a part of this experiment with us, by accessing all of the content on-line after the event and perhaps planning to come to Learning 2006 (Nov 4 – 8 in Orlando).

Thank you and I look forward to continuing to learn with you, my learning colleagues.

Elliott

Yes, perhaps not all will be the kind of conference wikis that I’m thinking of. But a quick sampling yields the names of many conferences:

• X-Tech 2005 – May
• Canadian Library Association (CLA) Calgary 2005 – June
• ALA Chicago 2005 – ALA Chicago Wiki – June
• “What The Hack 2005″ conference – July
• OpenEducation2005 – OpenContentWIki – September
• Web 2.0 Conference – October
• WikiSym 2005 – October

AND THE LATEST conference wiki is — Learning 2005. Eliot Masie’s latest newsletter announced:

“A Program as a Wiki: We have placed our entire Conference Program in an interactive wiki. This means that every session is open for comments, extensions and even revisions by our attendees. Quite a difference from a printed traditional program. In the last few days, we have had hundreds of people start to extend the program, volunteer to co-facilitate and add their perspectives. This is evolving the program from an agenda
publication to a dynamic needs assessment and content evolution tool.”

Sure wonder which one was the first conference wiki of them all.

Personally, while attending the eAgenda 2005 conference organized by NTU last August, the thought of using wikis for conferences first crossed my mind. I was supposed to be a scribe for the two-day conference. Ended up bringing my own notebook PC and started entering personal notes on the conference into my wiki. And I couldn’t help thinking, “How wonderful it’d be if all attendees enter their comments/notes into a common wiki.”

And it is happening now — all over the world!

“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.”