What a great way to learn: spend a day and a half with friends you really respect having a free-flowing group conversation with fifty or sixty people who yearn to change but are mired in the last century’s clutches. Marcia, Eugene, Ross, Jerry, Clay, David, Mark & I tried to help “the Agency” reconcile secrecy with Web 2.0 & collaboration.
Here’s an organization that celebrates secrecy. (Need to Know. Eyes Only. Top Secret Crypto.) It’s also an organization that appreciates that conversation and collaboration improve the quality of information. How do you use blogs, wikis, collaboration, and informal learning without compromising the mission? This engagement called more on my undergraduate study of sociology than my graduate work in multinational business or my current fetish with Web 2.0.
Many of the situations facing the Agency mirror those in corporations: email overload, group memory, grappling with career transitions, a rapidly changing environment, relationships versus events, stocks versus flows, being a real person while at work, the wisdom of tags, and other stuff I’m not going to tell you about (although this was not a classified event.)
If you are looking for a more intelligent description of what went on, visit this guy’s blog.
Pithy aphorisms and essence:
Collaboration doesn’t exist without a goal
Software never sticks to the wall; people stick software to the wall
We’re about 10 years into a 30-year evolution
Tags are an escape from file cabinets
De-silo-ize the metadata, not the content
Inaction is a decision; consider the cost of not doing something
All life is a beta.
Support the Agency. You don’t have to like the people they report to.
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5 comments ↓
[...] A few days ago I posted observations from a session with the CIA. Decentralized Intelligence Agency (Jay Cross) What a great way to learn: spend a day and a half with friends you really respect having a free-flowing group conversation with fifty or sixty people who yearn to change but are mired in the last century’s clutches. [...]
Syracuse University’s School of Education is developing a new set of courseware tools that support the tagging of class/learning community based activities with the institution, program, class, group and/or individual goals that they are designed to address. Your “pithy aphorisms” apply quite nicely to our tools.
The tools are designed specifically to selectively “de-silo-ize” the goal metadata across a program and to present students, faculty and program coordinators with a bigger picture of their activities and results of their own work. The idea of creating a network of activity around learning outcomes or goals puts a new spin on the all to familiar “social networking” idea and speaks to the need for accountability in education without “high stakes testing”.
Spying 2.0…
The New York Times Magazine ran a long piece today by Clive Thompson on Open-Source Spying. It described how the intelligence community has started using open-source and off-the-shelf social software such as blogs and wikis to encourage sharing of info…
[...] and his ability to make topics lively. He’s already written a dandy missive on this event, Decentralized Intelligence Agency and a compilation of the others posts in More [...]
[...] Decentralized Intelligence Agency [...]
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