If you haven’t yet, be sure to read through this past Sunday’s cover story from the NY Times Magazine, called “Open Source Spying: could wikis and blogs prevent a terrorist attack?” It’s a very thoughtful, well written, and clear report on the attempt to introduce social networking technologies like these to the intelligence community as a way to identify meaningful patterns and keep up with rapidly emerging threats. It’s interesting too to be reading interviews with top NSA and CIA officials along with familiar names like Clay Shirky and David Weinberger.

The article has implications for business research and knowledge management as well: if you’re already well versed in social software and wisdom of crowd approaches to identifying useful knowledge, you won’t necessarily learn anything new technically here. However, the article does raise some very intriguing challenges regarding organizational issues:

1. how to bridge the inherent tension between the desire for open information and sharing and the desire of an institution (here the intelligence communities) to keep information private;
2. how to build a critical mass so that people contribute to blogs and wikis so they prosper; and
3. how to make sure that employees are rewarded and given proper recognition for contributing to blogs and wikis.

Any business considering introducing internal blogs and wikis as a form of knowledge management and information collection/analysis mechanism will need to address these same concerns, pointed out so well here in this piece by Times’ writer Clive Thompson.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

Technorati Tags: Cyberintelligence

Technorati Tags: The New York Times