Intellipedia: Intelligence Agencies' Wiki Suffers Midlife Crisis
Did you know that the U.S. intelligence agencies use a wiki to share information? The Intellipedia project was launched in April 2006. Sixteen agencies of the U.S. intelligence community have access to it and use it to share information. According to a new report, however, the Intellipedia project is going through a bit of a midlife crisis right now. Until now, the wiki has mostly been curated by early adopters and enthusiasts, but a lot of the agencies have not been able to make it a part of their regular workflow, as many potential users are not comfortable with contributing to it yet.
Some agencies, like the Joint Chiefs of Staff, use the wiki on a regular basis to vet and publish weekly report according to the Government Computer News (GCN), but other agencies still prefer to use their own systems instead of or in addition to the Intellipedia.
Midlife Crisis
During a talk at the Semantic Community-Semantic Exchange Workshop, Chris Rasmussen, a social-software knowledge manager and trainer at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, outlined some of the reasons for this reluctance to adopt the Intellipedia.
One of these reasons cited by Rasmussen is a fear of the unknown. Instead of solely relying on Intellipedia, users often use additional, unconnected systems to save their information as well. Rasmussen also notes that some users are simply not comfortable with contributing information to a social-networking tool.
Rasmussen also points out some problems with the grass-roots approach that is at the core of the Intellipedia, which, by the way, is built on top of MediaWiki, the same software that powers the popular Wikipedia. As there is no standard for tagging articles, for example, users often use very 'agency-centric' terms to tag their posts, or use the wrong tags altogether.
Solution: Force People to Use It (?)
The solution to this? Rasmussen tells the GCN that the grass-roots approach has gotten them this far, but that a top-down approach might be necessary to push the project further: "This is work. We force people to do stuff [they don't want to do] all the time -- we make people come in sober and wear clothes. In certain cases top-down may not work, but in certain cases it does."
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They need to leverage their network.
http://tr.im/gk8j
With the adoption of any new technology, web-based or otherwise, there will always be fuddy-duddies dragging their feet. The trick is to find the right champion for your effort.
Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia's global empire:
http://bigthink.com/topics/the-internet/ideas/jimmy-wales-on-expanding-wikipedias-global-reach
Hi Chris,
in addition to your wiki you can try out our social search service Qitera to let your users easily gather, share and search content. By letting users clip relevant news by just one click (browser plugin) the whole research process becomes very intuitive and does not require much effort from the user. By capturing, indexing and analyzing entire pages we build a social search index that is integrated into Google and other information touch points (e.g. your portal search) - so users can find relevant stuff where they are looking for it.
a RWW review of the service can be found http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/qitera_integrates_with_google_and_yahoo.php
Would be interested to get in touch.
Regards,
Carlo
This "report" is just one guy's opinion of the state of affairs of Intellipedia. In fact, Chris hasn't participated much on the wiki himself recently, opting instead to stroke his ego on public speaking engagements. In fact, the user adoption of Intellipedia continues to skyrocket daily and individuals from across the Intelligence Community are seeing real results from using it as their daily workspace. BUT, just like Wikipedia, only a small percentage of the entire population regularly edit - that's just a factor of wiki community usage. As the more senior rank-and-file (who are typically against ANY change, but especially learning new technology) are replaced by younger blood who are "digital natives," we're seeing greater adoption rates.
A forced use of the wiki would completely backfire. We've seen it before with isolated examples of teams and groups. It's much better to leave it alone and allow the grassroots approach to continue to work it's way through the workforce.
"the dude" love the personal attack. Your not editing/head in the clouds insult is shallow and cheap.
How do we reduce the amount of duplication of effort? This will require that something gets replaced. Since the government behind the firewall lacks true market forces, “creative destruction” will require hard decisions to turn some systems and process off and focus employees into the new space and process. Intellipedia has some great success stories, but at the macro-level many of the new tools are viewed as an adjunct to the “official” process and are often used to supplement the current process, which is like putting an engine on a row boat to make the oars go faster as Clay Shirky once quipped.
Working on follow-up that expands on this idea.