DOD jumps on wiki bandwagon

Defense Department officials have launched a wiki as a way to improve collaboration among agency scientists, engineers, acquisition workers and military service members.DOD Techipedia is similar to online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the intelligence community’s Intellipedia, said John Young, undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.DOD Techipedia was launched Oct. 1 and announced today at the Emerging Technologies for Defense Applications conference in Arlington, Va. The event was sponsored by 1105 Government Information Group, which owns Federal Computer Week.“Improving collaboration requires a shift in our ideas, our values, our behaviors and our processes,” Young said. “We must provide the capability to defeat any adversary at any time, anywhere in the world.”DOD Techipedia will help fulfill that goal, he added.DOD spends about $10 billion a year on science and technology, and that money must be used effectively to help warfighters in the field, Young said. The new wiki will help DOD officials better coordinate their efforts, he added.“You want to do this so all the individuals out there executing some of that $10 billion can look elsewhere in the Defense Department and see if someone else has already tried an idea,” Young said. “That way we can get the collaboration [and] coordination and reduce duplication. It also lets us avoid learning the same lesson two or three times in our enterprise.”DOD Techipedia is available to federal employees and contractors registered with the Defense Technical Information Center. DOD plans to launch an external wiki in the next several months.“It will enable that industry access that I think is an important part of this,” Young said.