Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine cover story was about how the Young Turks in the US intelligence community bring to their jobs an appreciation of social media, while many of the seasoned pros question its usefuleness in a culture that does business on a “need to know” basis. Open-Source Spying was about many things, but the main thing was whether or not business as usual will work in a world where Al-Qaede is a distributed network.

One compelling example in the article illustrated how some members if the intelligence community used a wiki to keep up to date on events immediately after the Madrid bombings. However, with the need for unclassified, classified, and top secret information, there’s a limit to what people can share with their collegues. That’s the challenge.

In his book, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations , James Surowiecki outlines three things that need to happen in order for the wisdom of crowds to emerge, rather than the madness of crowds. They are:

1) The audience is diverse.
2) Everyone makes decisions independently of each other.
3) There’s a mechanism for aggregating everyone’s decision.

While the article outlined the technical challenges of the intelligence community’s legacy computer systems, the real challenge is social. A diverse audience seems difficult to create in a world where fewer people are given access to the information the more valuable it becomes. Indeed, a category of top secret information is inherently unsocial. It’s this unsociability that could doom the intelligence agency’s use of social software. In essence, the community formed around the software will be starved of diversity of opinion that it desperately needs to be intelligent.

Open source software can solve one problem: replacing a cluncky, decade old, expensive information system with a new, lightweight one that will facilitate more participation because–here’s the kicker–people actually find it useful. That’s another lesson to learn: you can either mandate participation with a system, or you can entice use by making it useful.  The harder part to change are the social mores surrounding the use of the software. After all, there are good reasons to keep things secret.

Yet, all is not doomed. Within the different social rings of unclassified, classified, and top secret, social software may still be useful, if in fact it’s used. The trick is getting people to participate because they find participation useful. That’s the big lesson to be learned.