MilWiki - collaborative knowledge management for crisis management
Wiki Technology in Crisis Management
A currently very important aspect of command and control is the increasing demand for collaborative capabilities. This has lead to equally increasing demands on technology for information sharing. The development of such technology is often complicated and expensive, hence reuse of off-the-shelf products (where applicable) is desirable. FOI has studied wiki technology for enhancing civil and military situational awareness.
The Wiki Tool
The wiki software is a system that enables users to collaboratively create and edit web content directly, using a web browser. The content is usually stored in a relational database, which is run on one or more web servers. Unlike other content management systems aimed at collaboration, which are often focused on documents (e.g., Office documents like Word and Excel) and how to organize them in folders, the wiki system is completely focused on the content itself. The most well known wiki site is the web-based free encyclopedia called Wikipedia. The Wikipedia project started in 2001 and currently (october 2006) the English edition contains about 1.4 million articles,
contributed by volunteers from all over the world.
MilWiki
At the Armed Forces Command and Control Development Centre in Enköping, development of methods and technology interacts in experiments. In this environment FOI has introduced MilWiki, a wiki for military knowledge base management. MilWiki is based on open source software, extended to handle geographical information. It was used in an exercise at Demo 06 Vår. The database was seeded with background information, such as geographical data, paramilitary forces and weapon systems, on a conflict in the fictitious Republic of Bogaland. The results of the experiment are documented in FOI Memo 1711.
Civil Crisis Scenario
In a large-scale civil crisis scenario, e.g., a natural disaster or terrorist attack, there is an urgent need to collect information for building an as good as possible situation picture. Considering the inherent chaos of such situations, it is not expected that normal sources and paths of information will function optimally. However, as has been registered during several recent major disasters, information may find other paths. During the July 2005 London bombings, the public used blogs and photo sharing applications on the Internet to share their observations and experiences. In less than half an hour after the first bomb exploded, the page “7 July London bombings” was created on Wikipedia and then continuously updated with more information and links to other relevant sources. Similar information posting behavior also appeared during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, which caused catastrophic damage along the southern US coastline in August 2005.
A non-public wiki for this sort of on-the-fly information gathering could be valuable to authorities trying to create a picture of a situation. In order to guarantee the quality of information, the editing should be restricted to a community of trusted users, scanning Internet and other media for news. Alternatively, editing could be allowed for everyone and a quality marker approach is used to ensure the quality of the information.