Word: intellipedia
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...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. (See the top 10 Secret Service code names...
...biggest hurdles was convincing security-minded spies that the system would be safe from outsiders. To assuage them, Intellipedia was built into the existing secure and classified networks known as Intelink, which connects the 16 spy agencies in the U.S. as well as the U.S. military, the Department of State and other agencies with access to intelligence...
...After three years, Intellipedia is humming. It operates in three spheres: unclassified, secret and top secret, with top secret being the most active, boasting 439,387 pages and 57,248 user accounts. Intellipedia is largely managed by volunteers and patrolled by "shepherds" who keep track of individual pages in their areas of expertise. Like Wikipedia, articles are created instantly - a page on the Mumbai terrorism attack last November was up within minutes of the news breaking - but authorship must be clear; there are no user names to hide behind. (See pictures of two days of terrorism in Mumbai...
...Intellipedia's boosters concede that their wiki is still largely an adjunct to the work of America's intelligence analysts. No finished intelligence product for decision makers is generated from Intellipedia - National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) are still written the old-fashioned way, authored and circulated for peer review and consensus. When Tom Fingar tried in 2006 to produce an NIE on Nigeria using Intellipedia, he failed because it generated a stream of information rather than a formal thesis and was taken over by the traditional system...
...Greg Treverton, director of the Rand Corp. Center for Global Risk and Security, says the problem isn't that Intellipedia can't produce NIEs but that decision makers rely too heavily on such reports to begin with. "There's much too much concentration on finished intelligence," Treverton says. "Intelligence analysis should be a sense-making exercise, a process of working on problems and trying to get sharper at them. Intellipedia is ideal for that. If you slice it at any given time, you are saying, 'Here is the best state of understanding at the moment...