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Intellipedia vs. DoD Techipedia

• The restricted version of DoD Techipedia is open to a wider audience than Intellipedia or Diplopedia. Most Federal Government employees or contractors.
• Originally a public version of DoD Techipedia was planned.
• DoD CAC Cards were desired as a method of authentication. The CAC card could be used to speed up registration. Also it could reuse existing Single Sign On architecture.
• Integration with existing DoD Science and Technology information was desired.
• The content of Intellipedia was very different than the envisioned content of DoD Techipedia

One view is that the content of a wiki is user driven, and they add information as needed without a centralized authority. Likewise, creating a new wiki is community-driven. They can create wiki's as needed without a centralized authority.

The government is seeking to avoid redundancy and promote transparency and cooperation. Redundancy isn't an issue if the content/needs are very different. Transparently and cooperation can be solved by giving people accounts on each other's systems.

Wiki's succeed because a) people enter in things they find useful, and want other people to know, b) being able to browse to things they find useful and interesting and c) being able to search/find things they find useful and interesting. Signal to noise ratio is important.

Here's a response to:

1. Shock and horror that we would "put all of our information Out There"
2. The desire to have "our OWN wiki"
3. The realization that "our wiki is empty and sad"
4. The populace of your org realizes #3, and starts using Intellipedia

In order for 3 and 4 to happen, a large enough part of the community would have to know that a) Intellipedia exists b) I can get an account c) it has the content I need. Otherwise, it turns into 3. We look at the other wiki, and see it is useless and full of junk I don't care about.

Response to 1 - If you are referring to the DoD in horror that the Intel community was using a wiki, I don't think that factored into it.

I think it more fit:

• Hey, I am having this problem, and maybe having a wiki could help
• Internal discussion about the danger of us putting all our information out there.
• Well, all these other organizations (including Intellipedia) are using wiki's, and it is helping them a lot.
• The concept of using their wiki doesn't seriously occur to us. For a variety of reasons different people think it won't work.
• So we build what we think fits our organization.

When the concept of Intellipedia came up, did the builders consult the DoD or the FBI on their needs (stakeholder buy in)? Did they pre-create some content for the DoD/FBI users? Did they send many emails out to DoD/FBI people saying, hey, we have these really cool site, and there's some stuff in it that is useful to you.

Why weren't Intellipedia and Diplopedia built as one system? What about OMB MAX?

One person said "Does the intelligence community really need to know how to maintain an m1 abrams tank? But having a page for M1 abram tanks would be a good thing to have wikified. What would someone who maintains a tank care about some commentary on signal analysis? However, a pilot might want to know how the intel group finds out if a missile is locked on him, and the intel group might want to know how fast the plane can get out of there.

I agree with you on Bureaupedia though. There has to be a bit of overlap.

NOTE: The person wanted me to add the caveat that this "is speculation from someone who wasn't involved in these details."

Thanks for the comment A!

Please share your thoughts!

Tags: intellipedia, wiki, techipedia, DoD, bureaupedia, intelligencecommunity, omb, cac card, collaboration, information sharing, anonymous