CIA explains its Wikipedia-like national security project

For any company moving to embrace Enterprise 2.0, some resistance to the tools that first gained traction within the consumer space is often inevitable.

But when some in the CIA began pitching Intellipedia, a Wikipedia-like project for its analysts and spies, they were met with some fierce critics.

"We were called traitors, [and were told] we were going to get people killed," Don Burke, Intellipedia's doyen in the CIA, said today at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference here. Sean Dennehy, the CIA's Intellipedia evangelist, added that selling superiors on the use of such tools for collaboration was especially tricky.

"We still call spies collaborators," he noted. "We're trying to encourage collaboration, but there is still a negative connotation with that word."

Despite the early challenges, the CIA now has users on its top secret, secret and sensitive unclassified networks reading and editing a central wiki that has been enhanced with a YouTube-like video channel, a Flickr-like photo-sharing feature, content tagging, blogs and RSS feeds.