Last week, we told you about the Army's efforts to create a Wikipedia-esque website that encourages personnel to voice their opinions to help rewrite various field manuals. The goal of such a site is to get as comprehensive a manual as possible by allowing as many valid comments as possible - the definition of valid being "anyone around the world who has been issued an ID card that allows access to the Army Internet system."

Judi Hasson also wrote a commentary talking about similar efforts by the intelligence agencies (Intellipedia) and the Department of Homeland Security's National Cyber Security Center, encouraging real-time information sharing on threats.

Well earlier this month at the Governance, Risk and Compliance Conference in Washington, DC, Chris Rasmussen--a living intelligence and mashup evangelist in the U.S. Intelligence Community--spoke in depth about those efforts. He focused in on how wiki systems could help to reduce the amount of time it takes for government agencies and officials to come to conclusions on important decisions, citing how he has seen some decisions take as long as seven years to reach fruition.

"[Seven years] is a substantial amount of time," he said. "That's more than high school; that's more than college. Saying that government change takes time - the cliché's getting a little old.

"I don't want to go another seven years and be exactly where we are now," he continued. "That is why I'm pushing so hard for this effort."

Rasmussen also talked about social media and the government; notably, he focused in on sites such as Facebook, and some of the myths that follow it.

"If you're not under cover, you're job is not a secret," Rasmussen said. "Of course, you need to be careful, just like anybody else does, but the fact that you work for the CIA, you can be on Facebook and network. We have to be realistic; there's a difference between secrecy and mystery, and there's so much mystery with the intelligence community."