Comment on Belmont's "Center of Gravity"
In a post entitled, Center of Gravity, Wretchard said:
I am somewhat disappointed with Secretary Rumsfeld's response to the subject of the disinformation campaign he himself brings up: "that would be like trying to stop the tide. The last time out he described the enemy as winning the information war. Here he speaks of it again. But what to do about it?
My response was as follows:
One (option) is to openly court bloggers the way Wal-Mart has done. See yesterday's NY Times article entitled Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in PR Campaign. ...(I)ndividual (bloggers) can form loose-knit, issue-centric "citizen information militias" as I think I termed it in the comments of a previous thread.Each CIM would be organized around 1-2 major and a handful of minor issues. Each CIM would be formed of at least two major departments or functional areas- research and retail and possibly and third operations.
The Research department would work on information gathering and analysis. The Retail department's basic responsibility would be to identify channels through which, the means by which, and the audience to whom the CIM's messages could delivered. They might also cultivate feeders who could send useful leads to them and/or the research group.
If there is an "Operations" group it's job would be to maintain the critical infrastructure (websites, blog, etc) and to provide technical support and evaluate the cost and feasibility of adopting software applications, adding features (e.g. podcasting, video). In the CIM's early stages the Operations function could be subordinate to "Retail".
At the top of the food chain would be a farily small cadre of writers whose primary responsibility is to craft compelling content. If that group has a leader, it would also be his or her job to set the broad agenda for the CIM, in consultation with the other team members, as well as to look for opportunies to collaborate with other CIMs on projects of mutual interest.
The smallest number of people required for a CIM to be effective would probably be 5-6 excluding the occasional feeder. While the structure could theoretically scale up by an order of magnitude, in practical terms it would probably be best to split them at about a size of 12-15. It is my feeling that anything larger than that requires communication and organizational design practices that are overly formal for what should be a rather organic undertaking. Even a CIM of 12-15 should be able to be broken into two if new issue arise that require it.