Web Development Live

Call them the spies who came in from the cold. Two CIA employees discussed to a point the government agency’s Web 2.0 project, Intellipedia, at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this week.

While you wouldn’t think that the CIA has evangelists, that’s how Sean Dennehy, chief of the CIA’s Intellipedia Development and Don Burke from the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, described themselves. Both talked about how they went about creating a secure Web 2.0 environment for the intelligence community.

In a video interview with new media consultant David Spark of N.Y.-based Spark Media Solutions, Dennehy described Intellipedia as a Wiki available on three networks a top secret network, a secret network and a sensitive but unclassified network available to the intelligence community.

“Something that’s very important to make clear is that these are intelligence community tools and not necessarily CIA tools,” Dennehy said. “We are encouraging the adoption of these tools but they are community-based and provided by what’s known as the DNI or director of national intelligence.”

“He laid the philosophical groundwork for how the world is changing under our feet and what we need to do to adapt to that reality,” said Dennehy. “We wanted to know how to improve communications within the CIA and disparate intelligence organizations.”

Of course, there are differences between Wikipedia and Intellipedia. All edits are attributable and are not limited to being an encyclopedia. And also unlike Wikipedia, there are also many contributors from different agencies with attributable points of view.

The evangelists said Intellipedia is still in the nascent stage and initially met with resistance from a lot of naysayers in the intelligence community. Dennehy described these hesitant users as having “Wikipause.”

“A person has to go through that process of taking the courage to hit “return,” to submit their information to the platform and then see the benefit later,” he said. “It’s an act of faith actually to start publishing to the platform.”

Technology giant IBM has announced new initiatives for the emerging unified communications market including a wide range of investments, product and technology advances and collaboration with leading clients and business partners.

There will be a USD 17 billion unified communications market for the taking by 2011, and the Big Blue is planning big inverstments to meet the demand, said the company in a statement. In a near future major technological changes would reshape the way business communicate and collaborate worldwide across the private and public sectors and IBM is investing significantly in a range of resources meet the demand for these shifts, it said. IBM Research is currently exploring a growing number of social and collaborative software projects with over 70 researchers dedicated to this work in eight labs worldwide. In 2008, over 1,300 IBM software developers and technical experts will make innovative contributions to unified communications. New technical skills programmes for IBM developers are being used to help accelerate software development, including the teaching of Eclipse-based development.

In addition, IBM’s Venture Capital programme is working to identify and fuel promising new innovations in unified communications.A part of this investment also covers an expansion of IBM Lotus Sametime software products. The new IBM Lotus Sametime Advanced software, to be available from 28 March 2008, includes community tools that enable users to spend less time trying to figure out who can help solve a problem, by reaching out to a community of colleagues or experts instantly. Lotus Sametime Advanced also features persistent group chat and instant screen sharing capabilities. The company is also making full investment in training its engineers, consultants and services professionals in IBM Global Services Method and Reference Architectures.