Mercyhurst College Wiki on Global Disease

In 2006 and 2007 the NIC coordinated a project on The Global Disease Threat and Its Implications for the United States, which examines the strategic (economic, political, diplomatic, and security) impacts of infectious and chronic diseases. Such a wide-ranging topic requires harnessing expertise from across a number of different fields such as economics, political science, diplomacy, anthropology, public health, and regional studies, and we have been experimenting with a wiki as a means of building a virtual, multidisciplinary community to work on this project.

It is also important to look not just across fields of study, but also across generations. We were therefore delighted when a group of graduate students from Mercyhurst College's Institute for Intelligence Studies in Erie, Pennsylvania agreed to our request to use their Strategic Intelligence class project to support and augment NIC work on global disease. The Mercyhurst group consisted of 26 students whose assignment was to write their own wiki-based "National Intelligence Estimate" on the topic of global disease and its strategic impacts. The NIC project coordinator posed to them a "key estimative question," (what are the most important and most likely impacts on, and threats to, US national interests resulting from infectious and chronic human disease originating outside the US over the next 10-15 years?) and gave them telephone access to key IC analysts, while a member of the Office of the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis set up a private wiki for exclusive Mercyhurst use.

Once the preliminaries were over, however, the students worked in complete independence from any U.S. government entity, so the finished product that they presented to the NIC in February 2007 was entirely of their own making. The Mercyhurst wiki, completed in the 10-weeks duration of the Strategic Analysis course, contains over 1,000 individual pages. It assesses the strategic impact of disease in almost every corner of the globe, employs a rigorous methodology to define both "U.S. National Interests" and "Impacts of Disease," and is based on a wide range of research materials including U.S. government publications, World Health Organization reports, think-tank and NGO studies, and press reporting. Although the Mercyhurst "NIE" should not be construed as an official U.S. government publication, we consider this product an invaluable contribution to the NIC's global disease project: not only in terms of content, but also for the insights it provides into methodological approaches. The Mercyhurst experience was also an important lesson in how wikis can be successfully deployed to facilitate such a multifaceted and participatory research project.