Infovark

We arrived here in Boston tired, and pretty scruffy looking after the red-eye train from DC. But, we made it!

We just missed an interesting sounding opening presentation from Rob Carter from FedEx - it looks like FedEx are making extensive use of the web, facebook and blogs and wikis both within and external to their organization.

Sean Dennehy and Don Burke then presented a great seession on their work at the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA’s knowledge sharing ability has been greatly enhanced since they deployed their “intellipedia” - a mediawiki implementation that allows CIA staff to edit and share information freely, and without editorial regulation.

My favourite quote from Sean - “Wikis don’t work in theory - they only work in practice”

Other than removing the ability to make anonymous edits, not much was changed by the CIA when they launched intellipedia, last year.  They claim also to have a much higher contribution rate (Wikipedia has a markedly low percentage of users who actually edit it - often guessed at about 1-3%) - but they are still working with the early adopters - intellipedia hasn’t been wholly rolled out to the entire organization.

“A culture problem - not a technology problem”

Don mentioned that there was substantial resistance to their efforts to incorporate this crazy wiki thing into their business. Primary benefit comes from working at the broadest audience possible. The wiki approach also focuses more on topic than on organizational structure - it means that the point tends to be on content, rather than process. That’s a really good thing.

” But - I don’t have time to edit this intellipedia thing”

Don and Sean seem adamant that the best way to deal with this kind of response is for people to stop writing emails and documents, and start writing intellipedia articles instead. (I suspect that that’s going to be a friction point for them. People don’t like new ideas very much. )

All in all, this was a great session - intellipedia seems set to be a great success.