IC launches “Intellipedia”
US News reported this week on a new collaborative tool within the Intelligence Community for analysis: Intellipedia. From the article:
Intellipedia. Many of the hottest online tools now in use turn out to be ideal for sharing intelligence, officials say. Two years ago, the CIA launched its own wiki. (A wiki is an online site that allows users to collectively add and edit content, like Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.) Dubbed simply the CIA Wiki, it now boasts some 10,000 classified pages. In January, the DNI followed with a communitywide wiki, dubbed the Intellipedia. The DNI’s National Intelligence Council-which produces the government’s weighty National Intelligence Estimates on key topics-has just launched an experiment to produce the first NIE by wiki. The subject: Nigeria. Top experts on the oil-rich African nation are working together on the Intellipedia to help chart its future. “I don’t know if it’s going to work,” says Thomas Fingar, the chief of analysis for the DNI. “It might; might not.”
The DNI held a news conference yesterday to describe Intellipedia in greater detail. I think this is a great idea, and is a perfect example of how the intelligence community can harness new tools and technologies to strengthen analysis.
Update (10/31): More on Intellipedia from the L.A. Times.
