National Intelligence Council Sponsors Wiki on Global Disease

Updated below

Students at Mercyhurst College created a wiki-based resource on global disease to support the National Intelligence Council, while demonstrating the utility of the wiki approach for intelligence analysis.

“The fundamental question had to do with the impact of chronic and infectious diseases on US national interests over the next 10-15 years,” said Prof. Kristan J. Wheaton, whose class produced the wiki.

“The 26 students in the class worked for the 10 weeks of the course on the project, producing over 1000 pages of analysis on every country in the world. They also wrote global, regional and national interest reports. They even produced a process report that talks about how they did what they did and several videos to accompany the reports. The project was completed using entirely open sources.”

“The final product is interesting on a number of levels,” Prof. Wheaton told Secrecy News, “not the least of which is the way in which wiki technology facilitated the analysis.”

A description of the activity with a link to the final product can be found on the National Intelligence Council web site here.

Update: Further discussion of this initiative may be found in Government Computer News, Haft of the Spear, The SPOT Report and, for a particularly critical account, Kent’s Imperative.