[LINK] Intellipedia

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Intellipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellipedia


Intellipedia is an online system for collaborative data sharing used by 
the United States intelligence community.

It was established as a pilot project in late 2005 and formally announced 
in April 2006 and consists of three wikis running on JWICS, SIPRNet, and 
Intelink-U. 

They are used by individuals with appropriate clearances from the 16 
agencies of IC and other national-security related organizations, 
including Combatant Commands, and other federal departments. 

The wikis are not open to the public. (try going to Intellipedia.org or 
Intellipedia.net, apparently/obviously most are not intelligence enough)

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. 

It includes information on the regions, people, and issues of interest to 
the communities using its host networks. 

Intellipedia uses MediaWiki, the same software used by the Wikipedia free-
content encyclopedia project.

ODNI officials say that the project will change the culture of the U.S. 
intelligence community ..

Creation

Intellipedia was created to share information on some of the most 
difficult subjects facing U.S. intelligence and to bring cutting-edge 
technology into its ever-more-youthful workforce. 

It also allows information to be assembled and reviewed by a wide variety 
of sources and agencies, to address concerns that pre-war intelligence 
did not include robust dissenting opinions on Iraq's alleged weapons 
programs. 

A number of projects are under way to explore the use of the Intellipedia 
for the creation of traditional Intelligence Community products.

Intellipedia was at least partially inspired by an essay competition set 
up by the CIA - later taken over by the DNI - which encouraged any 
employee at any intelligence agency to submit new ideas to improve 
information sharing. 

The first essay selected was by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer 
of the Center for Mission Innovation at the CIA, entitled "The Wiki and 
the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community". 

Andrus' essay argued that the real power of the Internet had come from 
the boom in self-publishing, and noted how the open-door policy of 
Wikipedia allowed it to cover new subjects quickly.

Richard A. Russell, Deputy Assistant Director of National Intelligence 
for Information Sharing Customer Outreach (ISCO) 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.

In September 2007, sixteen months after its creation, officials noted 
that the top-secret version of Intellipedia alone (hosted on JWICS) has 
29,255 articles, with an average of 114 new articles and more than 6,000 
edits to articles added each workday.

As of April 2009, the overall Intellipedia project hosts 900,000 pages 
edited by 100,000 users, with 5,000 page edits per day..

Technical support

Google was contracted by the government to provide computer servers to 
support Intellipedia. Google also provides the software to search 
Intellipedia, which ranks results based on user created tags ..

--

Cheers,
Stephen