Intellipedia
Intellipedia is a series of three wikis that runs on JWICS, SIPRNet, and NIPRNet. They are used by the 16 agencies that comprise the United States intelligence community. It is not open to ordinary members of the public.
Intellipedia is a project of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) — Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (ICES) office headquartered in Fort Meade, Maryland. As of October 2006, it contained 28,000 pages and 3,600 users.[1] It includes information on the areas, people and issues of interest to those communities. Intellipedia uses MediaWiki, the same software used by the Wikipedia free-content encyclopedia project.[2] The ODNI says that the project will help revolutionize the prevailing culture of the U.S. intelligence community, widely blamed for failing to "connect the dots" before the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Sister projects are running on the U.S. Government Secret-level network known as SIPRNet and the Sensitive but Unclassified Network (SBU). SBU users can access Intellipedia from remote terminals outside their workspaces via a VPN. The SIPRNet is intended to serve a similar purpose for U.S. diplomats and Department of Defense personnel who are the predominant users of this network. OSINT users share information on the unclassified network.
Intellipedia differences from Wikipedia
Intellipedia also contains a great deal of non-encyclopedic content including meeting notes and items of internal, administrative interest. The wiki provides so much flexibility that several offices throughout the community are using it to maintain and transfer knowledge on daily operations and events. Anyone with access to read it has permission to create and edit articles after registering and acquiring an account with Intelink. Since Intellipedia is intended to be a platform for harmonizing the various points of view of the agencies and analysts of the Intelligence Community, Intellipedia does not enforce a neutral point of view policy.[3] Instead, viewpoints are attributed to the agencies, offices, and individuals participating, with the hope that a consensus view will emerge.
Why it was created
Intellipedia was created to share ideas on some of the most difficult subjects facing U.S. intelligence and bring cutting-edge technology into its ever-more-youthful workforce.[4] It also allows information to be assembled from a wide variety of sources and agencies, to address concerns that pre-war intelligence didn't pay enough attention to dissenting opinions on Iraq's alleged weapons programs.[5] A number of projects are underway to explore the use of the Intellipedia for the creation of traditional Intelligence Community products. In the summer of 2006 a National Intelligence Estimate on Nigeria was started using Intellipedia as the main collaboration tool.[1]
Richard Russell, Deputy Assistant Director of National Intelligence for Information Sharing and Customer Outreach said it was created so "analysts in different agencies that work X or Y can go in and see what other people are doing on subject X or Y and actually add in their two cents worth ... or documents that they have." "What we’re after here is decision superiority" not information superiority, he said. "We have to get inside the decision cycle of the enemy. We have to be able to discover what they’re doing and respond to it effectively."[2]
Potential problems for Intellipedia's success
One common worry among Intellipedians and potential hurdle to Intellipedia's success is if agencies in the Intelligence Community respond by creating their own wikis, which would strip away the benefit of providing a "shared" workspace for different agencies across the entire Intelligence Community[6] "It moves us away from homogenized intelligence," said Sean Dennehy, a CIA official involved in creating the new system. Dennehy stressed that disseminating material to the widest possible audience of analysts is key to avoiding mistakes citing an example where analysts from multiple agencies used the network to post frequent updates on recent events, including the crash of a small plane into a New York City apartment building last month and North Korea's test of a missile in July."[7]
Some view it as a risk because it allows greater information to viewed and shared[8], yet according to Michael Wertheimer, Negroponte's assistant deputy director for analysis, the risk is "worth it." The project was greeted initially with "a lot of resistance," said Wertheimer, because it runs counter to past practice that sought to limit the pooling of information.[9] He said there are risks in everything that everyone does, "the key is risk management, not risk avoidance." Some encouragement has been necessary to spur contributions from the traditional intelligence community.[10] However, he said the system appeals to the new generation of intelligence analysts because "this is how they like to work" and "it's a new way of thinking." [11][12]
Community
Intellipedia champions award shovels to users to reward exemplary Wiki "gardening" and to encourage others in the community to contribute. A template with a picture of the shovel, specifically a trowel, was also created to place on user pages for Intellipedians to show their "gardening" status. The idea was inspired by the barnstar,[13] which is used on both Wikipedia and MeatballWiki for similar purposes.
References
- ^ a b "U.S. intelligence unveils spy version of Wikipedia". Reuters. 2006-10-31. Retrieved 2006-11-01.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ a b "Wikipedia for Intel Officers Proves Useful". National Defense Magazine. November 2006. Retrieved 2006-11-01.
- ^ "Open-Source Spying". New Yort Times Magazine. December 2006. Retrieved 2006-12-03.
- ^ Over 3,600 intelligence professionals tapping into "Intellipedia"
- ^ Data from spies now assembled wiki-style, Los Angeles Times, November 2006
- ^ http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/11/intellipedia.html#comment-25336444 Intellipedia Discussion and the IC
- ^ http://esenai.com/blog/intellipedia/people/michael_wertheimer/ Intellipedia Roundtable Discussion
- ^ U.S. intelligence unveils spy version of Wikipedia
- ^ US spies create their own 'Wiki' intelligence
- ^ http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2006-11-02-intellipedia_x.htm
- ^ http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2006-11-02-intellipedia_x.htm
- ^ US spies create their own 'Wiki' intelligence
- ^ "EEK Speaks". Eugene Eric Kim's Blog. Retrieved 2006-11-01.
External links
- "The wiki and the blog: toward a complex adaptive intelligence community", D. Calvin Andrus, September 2005.
- "Wikis and blogs" presentation by D. Calvin Andrus at the Knowledge Management Conference and Exhibition, April 21, 2006.
- Text of the speech by Thomas Fingar at The DNI's Information Sharing Conference and Technology Exposition, August 21, 2006.
- "Rants + raves: agent of change", Wired, September 2006.
- "Spy agencies adapt social software, federated search tools", Government Computer News, September 25, 2006.
- "U.S. intelligence unveils spy version of Wikipedia", Reuters, October 31, 2006
- "'Intellipedia'? CIA jumps on wiki wagon", Yale Daily News, November 2, 2006.
- "A Wikipedia of secrets", The Washington Post, November 5, 2006.
- "Connecting the Virtual Dots: How the Web Can Relieve Our Information Glut and Get Us Talking to Each Other", Matthew S. Burton, Studies in Intelligence, September 2005
- "Open-Source Spying", New York Times Magazine, December 3, 2006