Suppose you wanted better ratings of intelligence reports. Where could that improvement come from? How could you possibly get it? Some years ago the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence proposed an answer of sorts. It was: use the method described in their Rating Scale document. In previous posts, I described various issues […]| Tim van Gelder
There currently seems to be a bit of a flurry of dramatic-but-disappointing articles in the security space. The ones I have in mind have three things in common: They call for radical transformation of major institutions; They say quite a bit about the current problems; but They say little about how the transformation is to […]| Tim van Gelder
In an earlier post I suggested that a marketplace for citizen intelligence might take the form of a platform hosting sponsored challenges, similar to the data analytics platform Kaggle. For convenience, I’ll describe such a marketplace as a CCI platform, with CCI short for “Crowdsourcing Citizen Intelligence.” Three big challenges involved in getting a CCI […]| Tim van Gelder
Anyone interested in how to improve intelligence analysis might want to check out at the latest issue of the American Psychologist. It is a special issue devoted to understanding how research psychologists help solve real-world problems as parts of multidisciplinary teams (to riff on the title of the free-to-download introductory paper). Three papers struck me […]| Tim van Gelder
How can we wrap our minds around futures that are at once immensely complex, and riddled with uncertainty? How can we assess the likelihood of a whole range of possible outcomes? Jon Worth, Brexit …| Tim van Gelder
In the previous post I raised various issues with the ODNI Rating Scale for intelligence products. At least some of these are serious problems. Some time in the future ODNI might put out a new and …| Tim van Gelder
This post considers a number of issues with analytic product evaluation method described in the document ODNI Rating Scale for Evaluating Analytic Tradecraft Standards (Rating Scale), the mo…| Tim van Gelder
In the previous post I argued that, to really take off, citizen intelligence needs a good marketplace to create and stimulate a strong market. There are many different kinds of marketplace, and I …| Tim van Gelder
I recently wrote that citizen intelligence is growing, and that if it gets big enough it may have important implications for traditional intelligence organisations (see here). What would it take fo…| Tim van Gelder
Citizen intelligence is any intelligence-type work done by citizens outside any large organisation such as an intelligence agency.* Citizen intelligence is thriving. I don’t have any real dat…| Tim van Gelder
