Monday, July 26, 2004

Community of Thought and Effort

One of the key, if underlying, themes in the Commission's report is that of the need for a community of thought and effort.   They speak of the need to share information; to have players be able to know when information is available, to be able to link disparate pieces of information in order to perform analysis and to create a coherent whole, and to be able to keep abreast of what is happening in other locations that's relevant to their own efforts.

This is not limited to anti-terrorist activities.

Years ago, I worked for a large computer company that attempted to implement a knowledge sharing activity.  It was a technological marvel that was only intuitively obvious to the people who built it.   I currently work for a large computer company that has been promoting the idea of resources on demand, and as part of that they have been encouraging us to create on-line profiles so that anyone who wants to know something that we know can query the system and, if desired, contact us.   That works fairly well, though you do have to get someone who is both knowledgeable in the field that you're interested in and able to speak coherently about it to people who, obviously, know less.  That's not a common ability, made less common by the tendency of people who understand technical details to look down on those who know less.

Its an interesting field, and I wish that I knew more about it.


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