Bazaars in the Government Cathedral

guanxi writes: "This article by James Fallows in The Atlantic is one of the most interesting I've read all year. It describes how innovators in government are applying the concept of the Bazaar: The many eyes of 'Open-Source Intelligence' movement that provides better intelligence than classified sources, and a b2b-like marketplace created by World Bank employees that distributes aid more efficiently than the bureaucratic process."

Comments

Re:Source?

[Goonie]

IIRC, "open source intelligence" has another meaning for real spooks - it's intelligence gleaned by reading public sources (newspapers, trade publications, scientific journals, websites etc).

From what little I've read about the area, for some sorts of intelligence-gathering this gets as much info as cloak-and-dagger stuff.

However, presumably what they're talking about here is using bazaar techniques (mailing lists, whatever) to help share and evaluate intelligence information. That's probably not a bad idea either, if you can manage the security risk.

Re:Source?

[Broadcatch]

About ten years ago at a Hackers conference at Lake Tahoe I met a CIA agent named Robert Steele who regularly spent huge amounts of tax dollars to buy proprietary information from closed sources and provide it to various government intelligence agencies. I told him about the Internet and for several hours toured him though many open, free resources that I had come to know using FTP, Gopher, etc. (Not much was yet available by web.) He was blown away and spent most of the rest of the conference surfing the 'net.

Not too long after that quit his government intelligence gathering job to create Open Source Solution which provides most of the same data to the same agencies at a much lower price point, saving taxpayers millions of dollars a year.

I don't like most of those three-letter-acronym agencies, but I think this is a Good Thing.