Intelligence Community Embraces Open Source and Crowdsourcing

November 24, 2014 By IdeaConnection

720px-US-NationalGeospatialIntelligenceAgency-2008Seal.svgIn a recent radio interview, the chief information officer of the USA’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) restated the organisation’s support and investment in crowdsourcing solutions.  Speaking on Federal News Radio, Dave White highlighted the GitHub platform and the need for wider collaboration.

The GitHub platform is an open innovation portal that allows registered users to help the agency develop apps across 16 areas, including anti-piracy and tools for first responders.

Bucking the intelligence community status quo, NGA sees a lot of opportunity in engaging with external knowledge sources. Dave White said:

“The talent that is out there across the broader community in industry and across the government really provides a really impressive opportunity. While there are some security concerns, I believe the way we deployed this architecture really address those security concerns and gives us the balance of benefitting from the GitHub capability versus the cyber risk.”

Benefits

According to White the benefits have so far been out of the box thinking, cost savings and innovation that is helping to advance the agency’s mission. Furthermore, he says the benefits are far outweighing the risks.

Open Source

The agency releases code as open source and allows registered users to work on it, whilst retaining the rights. Chris Rasmussen, NGA’s public software development lead, who was also interviewed on the program, said the crowdsourced approach could lead to ideas not previously entertained.  This comes as a result of getting a large pool of talented people to look at the problems.

Many Missions

To help safeguard the security of the code, NGA has procedures in place to scan and review it for potential problems.  Such is the organisation’s faith in the crowd that there are currently 50 projects on the  Github platform.


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