All news, All about Intellipedia!

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 came across a post on the MAZZ-INT blog on AFCEA's website. It appears that he went to the Analytic Transformation conference (that I really wanted to go to :) and from what he wrote, it appears that he has seen this before to some extent. Not the specific technologies that are being used in Intel 2.0 (e.g. Intellipedia and A-Space), but the thought processes behind them. And he notes the following at the end of his post:

Going back to the future, it is worth remembering those CMS [what some think of as the predecessor to the DNI] IC collaboration conferences showed, and the 9-11 and WMD commissions found, that IT tools and DCIDs don’t naturally lead to collaboration or intelligence sharing. The captain in Cool Hand Luke learning that he could not mandate communication should be a cautionary tale for the IC on this journey to transform analysis.

My advice to the IC is this: get the tools discussed in Chicago to transform analysis through collaboration and intelligence sharing in place quickly, but do not expect this behavior to be commonplace until the community leadership models it, values it, and incentivizes it.

In his post and words, I see skeptical optimism in his words. They are the words of someone who has seen and heard this before but is hopeful that this time it will be different.

So the real question to the entire community is: What is going to be different about this time around?

Anyone care to elaborate or speculate?

One note, based on Jesse Wilson's comments regarding General Cartwright, I think some leaders are already modeling and valuing "it." Now let's see if they incentivize it!

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

I referred to the INSA Analytic Tansformation conference in a previous post and a friend sent me a link to the INSA Analytic Transformation presentations in video. (Thanks friend!)

I haven't had a chance to watch them yet, but feel free to take a look at them and post your thoughts and comments (good or bad) here. 

The one that might be interesting is: A-Space: Bringing Web 2.0 to IC Collaboration by Robert Cardillo

I'm listening to it and one interesting stat is that 61% of employees at DIA have been at DIA under 5 years. Interesting!

Another quote (which is kinda scary, but true) is "we don't know what we know." 

One question that was presented was curious: "What tests have been done to demonstrate the utility of A-Space?" 

My answer: how can you really test a social network? You can test its features, but the most important part of social software is the people that will on the network. A social network could have the greatest features in the world, but if noone uses it, it's worthless.

another question presented to Mr. Cardillo: "Do you see a place for a Second Life-like concept in the IC?"

his answer: "That's where these people have these fictitious lives on the Net. I don't think so, I hope not."

my answer: He probably doesn't really know what it is so he may have been a little premature in stating that he doesn't think especially since Sean Dennehy, the CIA's Chief of Intellipedia development, recently was in FCW article:

Dennehy added that some users are asking for a virtual world for the intelligence community similar to Second Life.

“I think it is a no-brainer,” he said. “We could use it for training and other things.”

Hey if the CDC has Hygeia Philo, the virtual public health worker in the "virtual CDC" (in Second Life), why can't the IC have virtual workers?

An even better reason why the US Intelligence Community should be on Second Life is here. Scary... The US IC may need to speak with their Aussie counterparts...

Posted by eMarv at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Just saw this on InformationWeek's website where Dr. Wertheimer explains A-Space further:

In December, the DNI will launch A-Space, a portal that will eventually include everything from wikis, blogs, social networking and personalization to RSS feeds, collaborative Web-based word processing, mash-ups, and content tagging all built atop an underlying services-oriented architecture.

A-Space will begin life as a portal that includes a Web-based word processing tool akin to Google Docs, a wiki-based intelligence community encyclopedia known as Intellipedia [self-referencing link, I gotta get links somehow :) ] and access to three "huge, terabyte databases" of current raw intel for analysts to sift through. It'll be scaled for 10,000 users at day one. By the end of 2008, the DNI hopes to bring in other resources like intelligence blogs, social networking capabilities akin to a Facebook for spooks, secure Web-based e-mail, better search functionality, and much more.

So the reality is that true social networking capabilities will not be available until 2008. That's disappointing... More on this later (if I remember), I really need to get some sleep. (It's 4AM.)

BTW, I suggest that you read the entire article. One particularly curious thing I found: "The DNI has even been in talks with IBM about how to put 3-D gaming to work to do analytical problem solving."

Why only IBM, why aren't they talking to MMOGs?

Posted by eMarv at 02:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Don't get me wrong. I don't think that blind friend requests are necessarily a bad thing (after all I do accept practically all friend requests on LinkedIn)... I'm pretty sure there probably won't be too many SPAM profiles on it...

Anyways, I must say that I have some mixed feelings about A-Space (maybe because I'm not on it...). On the positive note, I think it is great that the Intelligence Community is expanding its thinking on need to share/write to release vs need to know/write to captivity. I think that A-Space could really enable folks to come closer together online while they are disbursed throughout. And the more people know each, the easier it is for them to share information with their friends.

Actually thinking about this further, this could help enable the Intelligence Community to become more disbursed (so that many agencies do not have to be so close to DC), which in turn could have many other effects including movement of jobs away from DC and (since I'm in real estate, I have to think about real estate) a potentially greater flattening of real estate values in the DC area (maybe I'll write a post about this on the real estate blog). But I'm getting ahead of myself, back to A-Space...

Rethinking my original mixed feelings, I don't think there is anything incredibly negative about it. Sure, people will have to learn a new system, but guess what, this system has not been created for the backwards-thinkers that purely think that "Loose Lips Sink Ships" because in reality loose lips among friends with the same access and that are generally working together for a better world is a good thing. Other arguments against may be: "I already have soooo much to do, now you're giving me another place to check for stuff." My rebuff to that would be, firstly, (if A-Space is like outside social networks), it will not necessarily be a place to create content... ooops... I reread the FT.com article and noticed the following (probably from Dr. Wertheimer's comments):

A-Space will be equipped with web-based email and software that recommends areas of interest to the user just like Amazon suggests books to its customers. The site will also allow users to create and modify documents, and determine user privileges, in a similar fashion to Google Documents.

So actually this could be a competitor for Intellipedia, but I sure hope it isn't. I don't think folks need another place to create items of interest. So the "another place to check" argument could be valid. I wonder how they will address that...

Looking at the rest of the extract above, I think that the Amazon-like recommendations could be helpful. However, I think that the true value of a social network is in connecting people because others can find out about people they don't know through their interests, past experiences, etc and then connect with them.

It will be interesting to see how quickly the community adopts A-Space and what percentage of the community will actually create a profile on A-Space so that they can reach critical mass because a social network without a good percentage (maybe in the Intel Community, that's 50% or so) of members is worthless. All they would be doing is connecting with people they know.  

So we'll see what happens...

BTW, I think I'd like to attend the conference that Dr. Fingar referred to in the article:

In September, the DNI and the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a public-private intelligence group, will hold a conference to enlist support and ideas from the private sector and academia.

Found it on the INSA site, costs $695 for non-government non-INSA members, 5-day conference held in Chicago (9/4-9/6), online and in DC (10/11). 

One final thought, I wonder what role the Program Manager of the Information Sharing Environment played, if any, in the implementation of A-Space and for that matter Intellipedia and the IC del.icio.us equivalent. It says on their website that they are "responsible for information across the federal government..." But they haven't had a press release since April 2007.

BTW, I first found out about A-Space on the TechDirt Blog. And saw the article they referenced on FT.com.

Posted by eMarv at 01:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)