User:Ottens/Wikistrat

Wikistrat Ltd., or WIKISTRAT, is a geostrategic analysis firm founded in 2010 in Israel.

Products
Wikistrat describes itself as the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy. It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a patent pending crowd-sourcing methodology to provide insights unavailable anywhere else.

This online network offers a uniquely powerful and unprecedented strategic consulting service: the internet's only central intelligence exchange for strategic analysis and forecasting, delivered, for the first time, in a real-time, interactive platform. It is both a global community of strategic thinkers and, in content, a scenario-driven model of globalization itself. Wikistrat Chief Analyst Thomas P. M. Barnett has described the concept as "Facebook meets Wikipedia," to describe the combination of a community of strategist and the environment of an editable and dynamic encyclopedia that is known as the Global Model.

Wikistrat sells its analyses of globalization, the Global Model, as well as analyses of particular events which are strategic simulations. In 2010, it ran a simulation on the death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, the results of which were referenced by CNN, Time and World Politics Review after Kim died in late 2011.

Wikistrat has been cited by such media outlets as CNN, Reuters, Russia Today, Fox News and NPR as a consultancy of reference for geopolitical issues.

History
Wikistrat was founded by Joel Zamel and Daniel Green in 2010.

2011 Grand Strategy Competition
Between June and July 2011, Wikistrat hosted an International Grand Strategy Competition which employed the company's "collaborative competition" approach to explore geopolitical developments, identify their opportunities and manage the risks stemming from them.

More than thirty teams comprised of MA and PhD students representing top universities and think tanks participated in the month-long competition. Teams were simulating thirteen countries over the course of the competition, analyzed their countries' economic, political and security interests; forecast their countries' national trajectories and their region's future strategic environment; defined strategic objectives and planned a grand strategy to achieve these objectives; and stressed-tested their strategies against geopolitical shocks to examine its resiliency.

Participants included the UK Defence Forum, the New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies' Center for Global Affairs , the University of Kentucky's Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce , Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and the University of Sussex. The team from Claremont Graduate University's School of Politics and Economics won the competition and a $10,000 prize.

Among the more notable, and published, findings of the Grand Strategy Competition was the New York University team's prediction that Russia would ultimately have to outsource its security if its trend of demographic decline persisted and the Russian economy remained heavily dependent on commodity exports. Participants from the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies argued that India was rooting for Pakistan's disintegration, considering the collapse of the Muslim state as a prerequisite to fully institutionalizing India's alliance with the United States. Students at Sussex believed that North Korea would collapse without Chinese support and therefore recommended that the communist nation diversify its allies.

The 2011 competition was cited by Reuters as evidence that governments and scholars of international relations were once again focusing on grand strategies "in a way not seen since the Cold War."

WIKISTRAT Featured in the Media

 * Thomas P.M. Barnett, Chief Analyst for WIKISTRAT interviewed by RT
 * Thomas P.M. Barnett, Chief Analyst for WIKISTRAT interviewed by NPR
 * WIKISTRAT Senior Analyst Kerry Patton on Fox News