Upside: Stories live and grow, remaining relevant long after their original publication (at no cost to us!)

Fair enough – in ReliefWeb terms, a wiki approach could start connecting the content of ReliefWeb’s output in interesting ways. But …

Risk: Stories get progressively less coherent as many cooks mess with them. Whatever brand authority the Wired name brings is diminished over time as the stories become less and less our own work.

… then the Trolls take over

Source Intelligence is also an interesting area (not to mention an hilarious abuse of the phrase concept of open source) which seems to be gaining ground.

Reliefweb is a phenomenal service for the community, but there is agreement that it works at a particular level (i.e. on headquarters / policy issues) but has almost not operational utility.

The bonus of a wiki is that it’s very accessible and driven by users. ReliefWeb is a one-way street – you read the material they post – but a wiki is a stronger tool for sharing information in a group. There are strengths and weaknesses to that, but Wikipedia clearly shows that there’s mileage in the community-driven approach.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellipedia
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/01/1410232

I think an easy-to-use wiki for NGO security would be fantastic. There’s been too many situations where I have only heard of security situations through rumours and gossip (even from the organization I was working for!). There’s also been times where friends have contacted me for more information regarding security incidents.

I once suggested an idea of a wiki for sharing info, and my country director said that http://www.reliefweb.int already did this job. What advantages would a wiki offer?

But seriously – where there are security implications, obviously we need to take more care with our information. However, for reporting security incidents, a secure google earth style interface would be perfect, as long as you built authentication in.

Tom – I think the NGO security blog is predicting quite a lot of new ways of working. I think that the organisational approach is a steep hill to climb in terms of results, but improving access to security information resources – not just for security officers, but also for staff in general – is the critical target.

And yes, I do have a spare wiki.

Yet the main challenges are not in the tool, but a) in creating a successful, well led organisation to make use of it, and b) using it to improve the resources already available to security officers, or why would people contribute?

I think that as organisations, the NGOs don’t want this kind of technology mainly because they don’t know what it is. However I think that there are many individuals working in NGOs that do want this kind of technology.

I’ve never really gone crazy for screening in the NGO context. In many ways we should be the reverse of the military – everything should be made public unless otherwise specified.

Of course, we’re wrasslin’ with that very issue in the context of Sahana….