I haven't gone through it, but just the fact that a consumer's guide exists, is interesting...

Here's the contents for the Intelligence Overview section:

What do you think?

Tags: intelligencecommunity, consumer's guide, nipf, intelligence cycle

Tags: intellipedia, donburke, sean dennehy, cia, homeland security medal

Two principals from the Intellipedia project, Don Burke and Sean Dennehy, chatted with David Weinberger this week about some of the challenges and advantages that the technology could have on our nation’s most secretive agency.

Tags: intellipedia, timemagazine, interview, sean dennehy, don burke, radio berkman

I just saw this today and at first thought it was a joke feeding off my Obama on Intellipedia post and then got to reading the rest of the post and the comments. Whoa!

Judge for yourself, what do you think?

BTW, I added this comment: (let's see if the website owner approves it)

Whoa! The post on my website which you refer to http://esenai.com/blog/intellipedia/2009/04/president_barack_obama_creates_his_first_article_on_intellipedia.html was an April Fool's joke!

Tags: obama, barack, president, intellipedia

How Obama came to be on Intellipedia is a story in and of itself. It started when an Intellipedia insider suggested on change.gov that Obama create an Intellipedia account as a sign of support. A change.gov administrator that previously worked on Intellipedia saw the request and somehow got it in front of the President. Soon after, he was convinced and got his technology representatives to show him Intellipedia. He soon tried to self-register, but was unable to because his name was mistaken for someone on the FBI terrorist watchlist. A quick call to the FBI resolved the issue though and soon Obama had an account and the rest as they say "is history!"

• 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

Tags: gov20

We talked about:

• how she got started in the IC and Intellipedia and was recruited by Don Burke
• how Intellipedia makes blogs and a-space better
• a-space and that it is not a facebook for spies (yes, its for networking, but also sharing information, sharing rss feeds)
• a world without intellipedia?
• metrics
• the future of intellipdeia - she wants bots!
• volunteer gardeners
• focusing on management chain buy in
• DNI being supportive of Intellipedia
• Webcams in the Intelligence Community!
• how people were scared of computers, email and intellipedia
• second life sucking (ok, she didn't say that exactly...)
• discussing intellipedia on change.gov
• Obama's Intellipedia account

Listen in!

Download the interview!

BTW, here's Andrea's bio:
Andrea Baker served in the United States Army from 1994-1998 as a Signals Intelligence Analyst and an Arabic Linguist. Following her military service in the Army, Andrea became a career consultant for the Federal Government, supporting the CIA, DIA, NSA, NOAA, and the Pentagon. Andrea's background originally started in web design, graphics and web development and has transitioned from development and design over the years from multimedia design, technical lead, and project manager. In 2005, Andrea noticed the growing social web on the Internet and saw the future of how this could be applied to business and Government. Andrea joined Navstar, Inc. in 2006 as the Director of Technology. Under this role Andrea has helped their customers utilize Enterprise 2.0 tools effectively. She specializes in the user community advocacy and application developer liaison, through tools like wikis, blogs, and other social web tools.

About Navstar:
Navstar’s Mission is to provide Information Technology Services and Innovative Enterprise Consulting Solutions to our customers. We accomplish this by delivering quality services on time and within budget while meeting and exceeding our customer’s expectations.

Navstar highlights:

• Headquarters Falls Church, Virginia
• 48 Employees
• WBE Certification
• 6.5 million Revenue 2007
• Averaging 40% growth 4 years in a row
• Cleared Facility
• 2006, 2007 Washington Business Journal, listed as Top 25 Small Technology Companies
• Diversity Business Awards 2007, Top Woman Owned Businesses in Virginia ranked 14 out of 100 awardees

Tags: andreabaker, intellipedia, intelligence community, a-space, gardener, don burke, sean dennehy, wikipedia, webcam, collaboration, information sharing, change.gov, obama, second life, rss feed sharing

Check out his post (and at least comment on his post, if you don't comment on mine :):

Your Organizationopedia - Make it Stop!! | Social Media Strategery

Tags: buraeupedia, intellipedia, fbiwiki, steve radick, your organizationopedia

Here's an excerpt from the FCW article along with some color commentary:

Officials see Bureaupedia as a knowledge management tool that will let agents and analysts share their experiences to ensure that their accumulated insight remains after they retire. *It will be interesting to see how the FBI plans to extract tacit knowledge from retirees*. The project is a collaborative effort between FBI’s chief knowledge officer and chief technology officer. Why wasn't it a collaborative effort with the CIOs in other agencies? *I'm sure more than one would have mentioned Intellipedia*.

“An agent that retires after 30 years leaves with all of that — what we call a tacit knowledge — everything leaves with him,” said Zalmai Azmi, FBI’s chief information officer, who will be retiring in October. *I wonder if Mr. Azmi will be contributing to the wiki.* That includes “best practices, things that he did differently, things that he wishes he had done differently.” *I think that the "things that he wishes he had done differently" part would be especially interesting.*

The FBI’s new wiki uses the same open-source software as Wikipedia, and after the test period is complete, the agency will launch it on the FBI’s secure intranet, FBINet. *Again, why duplicate the effort? Intellipedia is already on Intelink which is already accessible to many agencies.*

...

An FBI spokesman said Bureaupedia will also let users link to articles in Intellipedia, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s wiki for the intelligence community. *Need I add anything else? :)*

read the rest of the article here: FBI creates knowledge wiki

I understand that many may argue that FBI is domestic and the IC is foreign intel, but I am sure there are ways that to avoid overstepping boundaries, both procedural and technological.

I just really dislike seeing duplication of efforts especially when something is already out there and it works!

Please share thoughts. Should the FBI have their own wiki? Maybe I should ask the FBI CIO himself... Anybody have his email address? :)

Tags: Bureaupedia, intellipedia, intelligencecommunity, IC, FBI, intelink, zalmai azmi, cio, dni, director of national intelligence, government IT

I just saw this article which referred to Don Burke's (the "Intellipedia Doyen") comments on there will be few secrets within 15 years and the fact that he personally is looking into twitter, twitscoop and hastags. Cool!

Check out the article and feel free to share thoughts here.

Tags: intellipedia, donburker, intellipedia blog

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is pleased to announce the "DNI Open Source Conference 2008" to be held on Thursday, 11 September and Friday, 12 September, 2008 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington DC. The conference is free; however, all who wish to attend must register online in advance.The two-day conference will explore a wide range of open source issues and open source best practices for the Intelligence Community and its partners. We invite participants from the broader open source community of interest including academia, think tanks, private industry, federal, state, local and tribal entities, international partners, and the media to attend.

After looking at the break-out sessions, it is unfortunate that below three will be held at the same time. All three look like interesting sessions:

Tags: opensource conference 2008, charlie allen, glenn gaffney, michael hayden, washington dc conference, dni conference, dni open source, chris rasmussen

We spoke about how he became involved with Intellipedia, the past, present and potential future of Intellipedia, virtual worlds, global collaboration, open source intelligence, mashups (can I call it "intellimashing" :) and purple intelligence. Don't know what purple intelligence is? Well, then you should listen below:

Download the interview!

Chris Rasmussen Bio
Mr. Chris Rasmussen is a social software knowledge manager and trainer within the US Intelligence Community (IC).  Mr. Rasmussen believes that lightweight and inexpensive "social software" tools such as Intellipedia (wiki), blogs, tag|connect (social bookmarking service), widgets, mashups, etc. provide a transparent and effective way to exchange knowledge over the IC enterprise.  These tools, in agency-neutral space, have considerable advantages over exceedingly complex databases and applications often with opaque data access layers isolated within agency footprints.

Mr. Rasmussen is the founder and lead instructor of NGA Social Software 101, which teaches how to use Web 2.0 tools to create and aggregate transparent, agency-neutral, topical knowledge.  The training plan for this course has been modeled by many law enforcement, military, and intelligence organizations.

In addition to social software, Mr. Rasmussen argues for the increased use of podcasts/vodcasts and videogame-based learning for knowledge transfer across the IC enterprise.  Mr. Rasmussen is also an evangelist for the increased use of "open source intelligence"- that gleaned from public documents, databases, blogs, videos, radio broadcasts, newspapers and discussion boards-within the IC.

Mr. Rasmussen holds a BA in History and Masters in National Security Studies.  He was selected as one the "Federal 100" by Federal Computer Week in 2008.  This award is giving to top executives from government, industry and academia that had the greatest impact on the government information systems community.

A special thanks to NGA Public Affairs Office for putting this interview together.

By the way, comments and questions are my new best friends, so please post any comments you may have. Thanks for adding a new friend! :)

Tags: chrisrasmussen, intellipedia, nga, interview, intelligence community, purple intelligence, intellimashing, mashups, social media, collaboration, information sharing, virtual worlds, second life, ivideo, tagconnect, social software, wikipedia, open source intelligence, osint

He went on to cite the tens of thousands of Google Earth users among the ranks of federal employees. Girourard noted the 80,000 members of the intelligence community who contribute some 5,000 items daily to Intellipedia, an online information pool that closely reflects methods used in the Google-sponsored Wikipedia.Federal agencies increasingly benefit from Google’s collaborative tools, Girourard said.
Google is pushing into a gray area with Intellipedia. As far as I've heard, Google really has nothing to do with Intellipedia other than it indexes Intellipedia (like any other site). I don't think Google want to tarnish their name by saying or implying that they basically sponsored Intellipedia... I'm sure the folks that really sponsored it and the grass roots effort wouldn't be too appreciative.

Just a thought...

BTW, regarding the article in general, cloud computing does make sense, but the bandwidth capacity and reliability needs to be there before everything can move online. Personally, I'd love to save everything online (in a secure area) so I don't have to worry about backups, by house burning down, etc.

Tags: intellipedia, google, google sponsorship of intellipedia, gcn, government computer news, cloud computing, intelligence community