Link Update...

Added to the Reading/Link List:

• A basic introduction to memetics
• "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us" by Bill Joy and Lawrence Lessig's "Insanely Destructive Devices"
• The Star Wars Fan Film Awards,  home of the Anakin Switch ad.
• The Wired Gadget Lab has an archive and an email newsletter you can subscribe to receive.

9:54:58 PM    

How Wiki Will Save the World and Win the War on Terror

Much of the discussion of what led to 9/11 has centered on information infrastructure issues.  Not only were the CIA, FBI, and other agencies prohibited from sharing information with one another, they had trouble maintaining their own institutional knowledge bases.  To put it another way, they didn't know what they knew.  It was this lack of cognitive cohesion that prevented information from FBI field offices from reaching either the highest echelons of the Bureau's leadership or the experts within the Bureau who might have been able to connect the dots.

Companies in Silicon Valley are already lining up for the billions in government contracts that will go to the bidders who manage to convince the various agencies that the solution to their information difficulties lies in the latest "solution" from Oracle or Sun or IBM.

But what if the solution a) already exists and b) is available to the government (and anyone else) for free?

Wiki is an open-source server technology that allows users to create dynamic web pages quickly.  Furthermore, other users can edit or add to these pages, making corrections, supplying new information, and inserting cross-references, via hyperlinks, to other pages.  The result is a collaborative, evolutionary database in which many users participate in continually improving the accuracy and validity of the content.  What better model for building and sharing knowledge?

To see a wiki in action, go to www.wikipedia.org.  Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia written entirely by its users.  Spot an inelegant sentence or a statement you know is false, and you can change it.  Hyperlinks in red indicate references to topic that have not yet been written.  If it's a subject you know something about, click the red link and you can be the first to write content for that topic.  For the more detailed or controversial topics, there is a discussion page where changes are first proposed and debated before being added to the wiki.  Even if changes are made, though, the wiki preserves all previous versions of each page, so you can go back in time to see who made a change and what the page looked like in its earlier iterations. For examples of all this, check out the entries for Catholicism and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Imagine an uber-wiki set up by all government intelligent agencies.  Anyone who worked for those secret spy shops could contribute their knowledge to the wiki -- from the lowliest analyst to the Director or National Security Advisor.  Heck, even members of the Congressional committees on intelligence and the armed services could participate.  All would do so anonymously, so that no individual felt intimidated by knowing the source of an analysis or opinion.  Similarly, no lower-ranking person could be punished for re-writing the director's content.

Clearly, a government wiki, especially one that contained this country's most secret sources and methods, would require some special features.  I would enhance both the security and immediacy of the wiki environment.  Security levels for user would control the level of intelligence you could access.  Pages could also have a real-time workspace associated with them where impromtu file-sharing, discussion, etc. could take place -- something on the order of a Groove space.  Add instant messaging/chat functionality with Skype's P2P voice sharing technology, and you've got a technology that would enable government agencies to collect and share large amounts of information at extremely low cost.  And, since the system would preserve anonymity, individual users could monitor and report abuses...call them "whistle-users."

9:42:46 PM