All news, All about Intellipedia!

The Partnership for Public Service will honor 30 finalists for Service to America Medals May 6 in Washington as part of Public Service Recognition Week. The finalists are contenders for nine medals, including Federal Employee of the Year, set to be presented Sept. 23.

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

Posted by eMarv at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had the pleasure of speaking with Andrea Baker recently about Intellipedia and all the great things she is doing.

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

Posted by eMarv at 09:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I found this article after seeing it bookmarked in kirbyp's del.icio.us bookmarks. Thanks kirbyp!

Now for the quotes and comments:

"...officials from the 16 U.S. spy agencies — and even some beyond that — are increasingly using a new internal website called 'Intellipedia'..."

"...even some beyond that..." Interesting! At least one of the beyond that is the TSA which they refer to further down in the article.

"All of these tools ... are in their Model T stage," conceded Sean Dennehy of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, who helped develop the Intellipedia.

Congrats Sean! (You will be in the history books, for sure.) Regarding the Model T comment, it is great to hear that the Intelligence Community is not waiting to develop a perfect solution (which doesn't exist) and wait to deploy it (when it is obsolete). Agile methodology at its best! Throw something out there, let people pound on it, massage it, throw it out there again and repeat. BTW, it looks like Sean is becoming the king of the memorable sound bite. Remember his other quote in the LA Times article: "It moves us away from homogenized intelligence..." (I also saw an interesting quote in Influence: The Pyschology of Persuasion that extends Sean's comment: "Where all think alike, no one thinks very much." Walter Lippman. I wonder if that is what happened in the past...)

"When New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle crashed his plane into a Manhattan apartment building this month, officials from the Transportation Security Administration and eight other agencies updated information on the accident 80 times in two hours."

Can you say success story? Imagine if this were to happen with any other potential terrorist event. Actually, who's to say it hasn't happened already?

"Don Burke, a CIA officer from the Directorate of Science and Technology, said more than 3,600 users have created log-ons to use the site..."

I wonder how many are active users or what percentage of the registered users are actually active. My guess is that they haven't tapped into the Long Tail yet since as mentioned further in the article there are "tens of thousands of users."

Getting some traditionalists to contribute takes encouragement. Intellipedia's architects have resorted to sending small, black garden shovels to contributors.

"I dig Intellipedia!" says the handle. "It's wiki, wiki, Baby."

Want to see what it looks like? That you'll have to Google.

Why not just get rid of the traditionalists? (Just joking, I know there will always be traditionalists but it doesn't hurt to ask... :) As you all know, you need not look further than this blog's Intellipedia shovel category to see the pic. We also know that they aren't giving them only to traditionalists as Kevin is proof.

Posted by eMarv at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)