A-Space

A-Space, according to Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School,[5] is a means of sharing information that, in the normal course of events, might not be seen at all.

He pointed out that "companies that rely heavily on innovation" spend considerable effort improving the communications among close colleagues.

To minimize the complexity of the first release, the initial operating capability (IOC) is Web based rather than a full desktop client.

One of the ways A-Space will maintain its security will be through observing traffic patterns, the department doing things like looking out for suspiciously anomalous searches.

Reports will be able to be tagged with important related words or phrases via a system called TagConnect and labeled by usefulness.

The Library's electronic card catalog – containing summary information for each report – will be classified at the lowest possible level, permitting analysts to discover everything that has been published by the Intelligence Community (IC) regardless of the original classification of the document.

Services provided by LNI will include the ability to request information directly from producers, qualitative measures of value, and statistics on Community coverage of priorities.

[10] "It boggles my mind that it took so long to understand the concept of bringing together all the community knowledge to use effectively," Hunt said.

"[7] In a compartmented environment, analysts may be unaware they have a counterpart, in another IC agency, working on a related problem, and they could assist one another.

[6] The Force Protection Assessment system uses a similar architecture to provide knowledge management and real-time updates on operational security analyses.

[12] According to Tim Hsia, a United States Army captain, "Market trackers absorb information continuously, rigorously track trends, and enable traders to formulate decisions based on the latest news combined with historical data.

Each city in the geointel database would comprise of an abundance of historical data consisting of analysis, logistical, intelligence products, and operational summaries from all branches of the military, the State Department, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), CIA, and National Security Agency.

Moreover, the geointel database would incorporate cutting open source intelligence (OSINT) products produced by news agencies, RAND, and other think tanks.

Intelligence could be pushed down to the lowest level which would then facilitate bottom-up refinement as each new unit that was involved in a certain locale could update the existing data to include their latest experiences.

The battlefield commander, diplomat, or United States Army Special Forces SF ODA (Operational Detachment-Alpha) team leader could then make informed military, foreign affairs, or political decisions that produce more effective results because the data retrieved from the geointel site would provide them with the latest ground truth supplemented with historic data....

There would need to be a thorough security vetting process to prohibit individuals from being able to achieve sensitive information outside of their region, scope, and responsibility. ...

An additional safeguard would be to have superiors and agencies to proof and screen all intelligence products posted by their subordinates so that faulty and inaccurate reporting could be stunted before other organizations implemented inaccurate information .. .readers could ... view the analyst's oeuvre, credentials, and security levels and also allow the reader to directly contact the author as to their assumptions and inquire about related issues pertaining to an intelligence product.Hsia points out that while SIPRNET (i.e., operating at the SECRET security level, not the higher intelligence levels) is widely available, "Expanding this network to encompass a more centralized program of data sharing would not require any additional hardware", but software changes in the devices now used to access SIPRNET.

If the prototype is small enough that a new version, which addresses the failure, is not expensive, incremental improvement would be the way to control costs.

Eventually, that will allow analysts and developers to write or install their own widgets (i.e., small customized programs) onto their portal page.

[citation needed] It will be implemented as a portal that includes a Web-based word processing tool akin to GoogleDocs, a wiki-based intelligence community encyclopedia and access to three "huge, terabyte databases" of "raw" (i.e., not yet evaluated) data for analysts to examine.

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