Visual Short Form Analytic Reports And Resources For Producing Them (Teaching Intelligence/Link List)

One of the exercises we routinely assign in our Intelligence Communications and Intelligence Writing And Presentation classes is a "visual" short form analytic report. The task here is to translate a primarily text-based report (in this case the classic "one-pager" or SFAR as it is known around here) into another primarily non-text-based medium (video, audio, interpretative dance...).

The fundamental intent of the exercise is to engage students' creativity and to get them to think about other -- primarily visual -- ways to produce an intelligence report. Decisionmakers have always wanted their intelligence packaged in ways that were most accessible to them (consider Kennedy's PICL or Reagan's videos of foreign leaders). In the future, however, they are going to expect it.

• For more on this, see Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind. For examples of how good design makes a real difference, check out some of the projects at the Art Center of LA.

It is our belief that analysts need to think about how to do this in a way that maintains the standards of a good, text-based intelligence product. It is fairly easy to abandon traditonal notions of objectivity and transparency, for example, in favor of a intelligence product that "sells" itself well when using some of these tools and techniques.

Why should analysts have to think about this? Don't most intel agencies have personnel tasked to do this kind of stuff? Maybe, but how many analysts today are required to make their own PowerPoint slides? Back when PowerPoint was new, a specialist made the slides and we analysts fed them the information. Today, everyone makes slides -- and many of them are awful. Grappling with these issues seems appropriate for students trying to better understand how to communicate the results of their analysis to the decisionmakers they support.

To get the students started, I point them towards a number of resources. The first are some general sites about visual thinking or visualizing data such as:

The History Of Visual Communication
Thinking Visually (slideshow of concepts)
The Periodic Table Of Visualizations
Visual Complexity (Examples of how to display data visually)
Information Aesthetics (the last three links are to excellent blogs that focus on visualization)
Eager Eyes
Flowing Data

I also point them towards a number of readily available but under-used tools (such as Windows Movie Maker which comes with every Microsoft Windows machine) as well as some of the more interesting and useful online tools I have run across or which have been used by other students:

Programmable Web (massive list of available tools)
Animoto (automated, sophisiticated slide show production)
Comiqs (See an example here)
Just Leap In (customizable, web-based virtual world)
Community Walk (Customizable mapping software based on Google Earth)
Dipity (amazing timeline generation product)
MapWing (Simple tool for virtual tours)
Issuu (Sleek online document viewer)

These are obviously just a few of the tools and sites available for this kind of project (Don't believe me? Just check out MakeUseOf's List of Tools...). Do not hesitate to add your favorites to the comments!

Evaluating The Reliability Of Social Media Sources, An Amazing Technology Roadmap And Reagan's Visual SFARs (Link List)

I love having friends and alumni that send me interesting links and this week contained an extraordinary crop!  Here are three of the best things that happened to cross my desktop:

Some of the Ushahidi Deployments

How To Verify Social Media Content.  We have known for some time how to evaluate online sources for credibility in a general sense (See Dax Norman's thesis and checklist here.  Not only it is a brilliant piece of research, it is also the only such document designed by an intelligence analyst for use by other intelligence analysts).  When it comes to understanding how to evaluate social media sources, however, the question becomes much trickier.

Patrick Meier is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and previously co-directed Harvard's Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning (If you are not familiar with the crisis mapping platform Ushahidi, stop now and go here).  He has had extensive real-world experience with social media sources in the hundreds of uses of the Ushahidi platform in crises world-wide and he has translated that experience into an outstanding list of hints and tips for evaluating social media (Twitter specifcially).

While his insights into evaluating social media are born of this experience rather than more rigorous statistical analyses (like Dax's), his findings ring true and certainly operate as an excellent general purpose checklist until the science catches up. 

http://envisioningtech.com/

Envisioning Emerging Technology For 2012 And Beyond.  Through a series of serendipitous accidents, I have worked on a number of projects looking at technology trends. 

While I normally start with Gartner on these types of questions, I have just added Michael Zappa and his excellent work at Envisioning Technology to my short list of go-to sources.

The technology roadmap he has built is awesome (you can see the compact version to the right but I strongly recommend you take a look at the interactive version here (Note to Michael Zappa:  If you are going to make it Creative Commons, you might as well make it embeddable as well...Please!)).

Ronald Reagan: Intelligence and the End of the Cold War.  Finally, I like to emphasize the importance of production skills for my students with a variety of stories about high-level decisionmakers who preferred their intelligence in "alternative" formats.

For example, John F. Kennedy had the President's Intelligence Checklist (the PICL -- analysts who worked on the product were said to work in the "PICL Factory").  Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, liked to see some of his intelligence, at least, in the form of short videos.

(Note:  One of the kinds of analytic report writing we teach at Mercyhurst is called, generically, the Short Form Analytic Report, usually pronounced "Ess-Far".  When this type of report contains more visual elements than written ones, we call it a visual SFAR, hence the title to this post).

Many have speculated that this was because Reagan was an actor and naturally gravitated to film but, whatever the reason, it is an interesting lesson in the importance of producing intelligence -- that is, the ability to fully communicate the results of analysis to the decisionmaker that the intel unit is supporting.

You can see the full report here or watch the videos on the CIA's YouTube channel (!).   I have embedded my favorite (because I lived through it...) below: