My onfolio blogdigger search returned a link to a paper (added to my public resources) written by a CIA officer D. Calvin Andrus in late 2005. It says that intelligence should exploit possibilities offered by wiki and by blogospere. A quote:

“I suggest a corollary to Metcalfe’s Law. The value of a knowledge sharing web space (Wiki and Blog) grows as the square of the number of links created in the web space. There is not just knowledge in the content item (an intelligence cable, for example), but there is also knowledge in the link between one content item and a nother (a link from a comment in a blog to the intelligence cable). Think of the value of a blog that links a human source cable to an intercept cable to an image cable to an open source document to an analytic comment within the context of a national security issue. When such links are preserved for subsequent officers to consider, the value of the knowledge sharing web space increases dramatically. When ten thousand intelligence and national security officers are preserving such links on a daily basis, the Wiki and Blog system has incredible intelligence value (Drezner and Farrell, 2004). “

“This paper identified a pressing Intelligence Community issue; namely, that the Intelligence Community must transform itself into a community that dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as the national security environment changes. The paper elucidated the principles from an exceptionally rich and exceedingly deep theory (Complexity Theory) about how the world works and has shown how these principles apply to the Intelligence Community. These principles include self-organization, information sharing, feedback, tradecraft, and leadership.”

“Lipnack and Stamps (1997) make a case that a successful virtual community is 90 percent culture and 10 percent technology. The most profound culture change will be for Intelligence managers to let go of their officers the same way the battlefield commanders have let go of their battlefield troops. Managers must trust their officers to directly share with each other and directly with the policy community. Intelligence managers’ role will become less command and control and more teacher of tradecraft and communicator of purpose and objectives. The Intelligence Community will need to put into place powerful incentives and rewards for managers to change. Indeed, Intelligence Officers must feel encouraged by their managers to spend their workday engaged in sharing activities. These changes will allow the dynamic learning community to emerge.”

“The changes in mindset suggested in this paper are significant. Enabling intelligence officers to independently express their point of view in a community-wide setting is groundbreaking. Equally avant-garde is letting intelligence officers create a body of intelligence knowledge without an editor in chief. Moreover, inviting our policy community counterparts at State, Homeland Security, the Commands, etc., to be full participants in these information-sharing activities is breathtaking. If anything, however, these changes are timid compared to the changes required to bring the community into the 21st Century. We mustact, or we will certainly continue to be acted upon. May we have the will to overcome our inertia and succeed in our efforts.”

What can I say? Some people tell me from time to time that blogging, wiki, social networks are just fads, and that they will not last long. I am positive that this is not the case, we are witnessing a massive change, mental, social, generational. Everybody needs to adapt or risks becoming disfunctional. Welcome CIA2.0.