Intellipedia suffers midlife crisis - 0 views
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The problem? The growth of the collective intelligence site so far largely has been fueled by early adopters and enthusiasts, according to Rasmussen. About all those who would have joined and shared their knowledge on the social networking site have already done so. If the intelligence agencies want to get further gains from the site, they need to incorporate it into their own formal decision making process, he contended. Until that happens, the social networking aspect of Intellipedia is "just a marginal revolution," he said.
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Established in 2005, Intellipedia, now managed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has approximately 100,000 user accounts. Open to anyone with a government e-mail account, it has social bookmarking tool, a document repository, a home page for each user, and collaboration spaces.
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For true change to occur, other agencies must use Intellipedia as their official conduit, at least for some functions, Rasmussen said. Otherwise, it is just creating additional work for contributors.
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Another problem is that managers may not worry that their employees would not be comfortable contributing information to a social-networking tool. Rasmussen said he talked with one executive who said employees may not want to contribute personal items to their home page.
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" 'Are you kidding?' " Rasmussen responded. "This is work. We force people to do stuff [they don't want to do] all the time — we make people come in sober and wear clothes. In certain cases top-down may not work, but in certain cases it does."
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Contributors need to learn to accept "an agency-neutral non-ownership" stance to their articles, he said.
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"If you bring too many locks into an overly cautious culture, that's all you get: locks," Rasmussen said. He also mentioned that mashups remain to be too difficult for non-programmers to create, and social networks continue to be held, presumably unfairly, by higher standards than other technologies.