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A Wiki Is Like A Room…
And Other Lessons Learned From 15 Wiki-based,Open Source, Intelligence Analysis Projects
Kristan J. Wheaton
Mercyhurst College501 E. 38
th
814 824 2023
A Wiki Is Like A Room…
And Other Lessons Learned From 15 Wiki-based,Open Source, Intelligence Analysis Projects
Imagine that your bosses have just assigned you to be the team leader for a large-scale analytic project:
“There isn’t any extra money,” they say, “for travel and stuff.”That doesn’t matter so much, though, as long as you have bright people,right?“Well,” they say, “they’re very bright and you have lots of them…but they’re...young.”
No problem. That's an advantage. Young means energy and few preconceived notions. Maybe we can use some special databases or other info to fill in some of the gaps?“No, sorry, no extra money. Didn’t we already say that? You can only useopen sources and your people aren’t yours full time either; they haveother jobs that they need to do. And by the way…”
Yes, you say.
“This project is incredibly important.”
Right. So what can you give me?
“We can give you a wiki.”
A wiki? What's that?
"Well, a wiki is like a room..."
In this paper, I intend to discuss the lessons learned from using a web-based collaborativetool, commonly referred to as a “wiki”
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, to create custom intelligence products for decisionmakers in national security, law enforcement and business. While I consider theconclusions in this paper tentative, almost exploratory, in nature, they are based on aconsiderable body of evidence. Over the last year, students in my classes at MercyhurstCollege or students working for me on funded research projects through Mercyhurst’sCenter For Intelligence Research, Analysis, and Training (CIRAT) have used wikis to produce 15 large scale estimative products for real world decisionmakers (or intelligence professionals who support real-world decisionmakers).
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Covering topics such as“The Impact Of Chronic And Infectious Diseases On US National Interests”or “The Role Of Non-State Actors In Sub Saharan Africa”,
collectively, these 15 projects have generated over 6000 pages of finished analysis andhave involved 97 analysts (many who worked on multiple projects). These students spent,conservatively, 21,000 analyst-hours in total on these projects. In addition to insightsgathered from observing and supervising the projects themselves, 63 of the analysts whoworked on the projects also took surveys designed to get feedback regarding their reactions to producing wiki-based analytic projects.The analysts who participated in these projects were mostly seniors and graduate studentswho have experienced working with conventional methods for developing analytic products either through their applied coursework in Mercyhurst’s Intelligence Studies program or through jobs and internships within the business, law enforcement or nationalsecurity intelligence communities. Despite their experience with traditional methods of producing intelligence analysis (or perhaps because of it), these analysts came tooverwhelmingly prefer, for a variety of reasons I will discuss throughout this article, touse wikis to produce intelligence.Quantity does not equal quality, however, which is why I also asked the 12decisionmakers who commissioned the analysis to take surveys designed to capture their reactions to and the relative strengths and weaknesses of wiki-formatted analysis. Thesedecisionmakers, as I will collectively refer to them, are all senior leaders in their respective fields or real-world intelligence analysts supporting senior leaders. In only onecase, where the decisionmaker was an alumnus, was there more than a passingrelationship to the college. They ran the gamut from elected representatives to veryexperienced intelligence professionals to Chief Executive Officers. While I will discussthe results of their surveys later in this article, all indicated that they were satisfied or
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A note on sourcing: Most of this report contains primary source research conducted over the last year involving the use of wikis in intelligence analysis. Much of the supplementary material relevant to this particular topic, however, is contained on the internet. For ease of review, I have left these references ashyperlinks to these internet based sources only for this presentation version of this paper.
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This research would not have been possibly without the help of the over 100 students from Mercyhurst’s Intelligence Studies program and the 12 decisionmakers who volunteered their time to sponsor these projects. Please accept my sincere thanks for all the hard work, feedback and trust.
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