A Top Secret Wikipedia for the Intelligence Community

Posted by: Amy Hooker, Director of Online Marketing Apr 15, 2009 0 Comments

With more than 900,000 pages,100,000 accounts, and 5,000+ page edits per day, the intelligence community that skeptically welcomed CIA information-sharing wiki Intellipedia back in 2006 is now fully embracing it.

Arguably the CIA’s most successful foray (that we know of) into Web 2.0 technologies, Intellipedia is “a classified version of Wikipedia [that] they say is transforming the way U.S. spy agencies handle top-secret information by fostering collaboration across Washington and around the world,” according to the recent article in Time magazine.

I find it interesting that one of the main hurdles to Intellipedia’s initial adoption was something we’ve experienced in our work with government clients: a resistance to change. From the article:

“Intellipedia’s godfather is CIA analyst D. Calvin Andrus, who wrote a paper in 2004 titled ‘The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.’ For decades, the U.S. intelligence system had been structured to answer static Cold War–era questions, like how many missiles there are in Siberia. What the U.S. needed after Sept. 11, Andrus argued, was “something that could handle rapidly changing, complicated threats. Intelligence organizations needed to become complex and adaptive, driven to judgments by bottom-up collaboration, like financial markets or ant colonies — or Wikipedia.

Sean Dennehy, 39, and Don Burke, 43, used the Andrus paper to push the idea of an intelligence-community wiki on their superiors at the CIA. They didn’t get very far until the then newly organized Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that the idea had potential — and even then it faced stiff cultural resistance. ‘There’s been pushback throughout the whole process,’ says Burke. Initially, analysts who were asked to participate said they were too busy or just preferred the old, proprietary databases managed by individual agencies.“

It was a good thing that Dennehy and Burke persevered through the original resistance, as Intellipedia has been credited with creating real-world results, including:

“Its advocates claim Intellipedia is not just a sign of change at the agency, but that it is also producing results. The first time chlorine was used in an improvised explosive device in Iraq, someone created a wiki page asking what intelligence officers and others in the field should do to collect evidence of the usage. ‘Twenty-three people at 18 or 19 locations around the world chimed in on this thing, and we got a perfectly serviceable set of instructions in two days,’ says Tom Fingar, who headed the National Intelligence Council from 2005 to 2008. ‘Nobody called a meeting, there was no elaborate “Gotta go back and check with Mom to see if this is the view of my organization.”’ Last year traffic on Intellipedia became so heavy that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had to find extra money to upgrade its servers.“

The next time you’re encountering resistance to the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in your department or government organization, remember this: if two individuals can convince an agency filled with people who are trained to “trust no one” to trust the power of Web 2.0 technologies, certainly you have a chance of promoting Web 2.0 technology in your own organization!

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Amy Hooker

Director of Online Marketing

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