Page:E-government 2.0 - Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access.pdf/18

 creased vertical sharing. And controlled access wikis can be set up to share inter-agency information, so increased horizontal sharing, as well.

The main point here is there is no requirement of necessity for the tool of a wiki to be open to the general public in order for it to be useful. The word wiki comes from a Hawaiian word wiki wiki, meaning quick. The concept of a wiki was originally created by a famous programmer named Ward Cunningham, who lives in Portland, Oregon. The basic idea of a wiki is quick collaboration. When people need to work together to produce some document, the only option in the old days would be to email around a text file or word processing document. The wiki represents a crucial innovation allowing for much greater speed. The most basic idea of a wiki is a website that can be easily edited by the readers, but modern wikis contain simple yet powerful features that allow for the users to control and improve the quality of the work.

Wikipedia represents the power of a wiki open to the general public, but I believe the same wiki technologies that powers Wikipedia is also being widely adopted inside many enterprises. And I will note here in passing a couple of examples of this innovative use, one in private enterprise and one in the U.S. Government.

First, consider Best Buy. Recently great companies such as Best Buy have been using wiki technology across the enterprise to foster faster information sharing and collaboration inside the enterprise. To give a hypothetical example of how this works, imagine the car stereo installer in a Best Buy store in Florida who discovers a faster or easier way to install a particular brand of stereo. This information can now be shared directly peer-to-peer to other stereo installers within the company across the entire store network. In the past, this kind of local information discovery was lost or isolated.

One Harvard professor’s research suggests that one key to successful use of new technologies is adoption. The tools must be easy to use and valuable in the day-to-day life of those using them.

Now I will take a quick look at Intellipedia. I am not an expert on intelligence gathering, so I will simply quote a useful resource, Wikipedia, regarding Intellipedia. The Intellipedia consists of three wikis. They are used by individuals with appropriate clearances from the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community and other national security related organizations including combat and commands and Federal departments. These wikis are not open to the general public.

The Intellipedia uses Mediawiki, which is the same software used by Wikipedia, and the officials who have set up the project say that it will change the culture of U.S. intelligence community which have been widely blamed for failing to connect the dots before the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Tom Fingar has gone on record describing one of Intellipedia’s intelligence successes. Mr. Fingar told DefenseNews.com that a worldwide group of intelligence collectors and analysts used Intellipedia to describe how Iraqi insurgents are using chlorine in IEDs, improvised explosive devices. They developed it in a couple days interacting in Intellipedia, Mr. Fingar said: No bureaucracy, no ‘‘mother may I,’’ no convening meetings. They did it and it came out pretty good. That is going to grow.