# DRDC paper:  Media shared with TF K'Har Commanders showed ANP positively?



## The Bread Guy (1 Dec 2011)

Here's a bit of background on GOSSIP (the program, not the sharing of entertaining, but factually spurious information):
http://forums.milnet.ca/forums/threads/101432.0.html

More GOSSIP (1.6 MB, 28 page PDF), this time about Afghanistan's police force via open sources - from the Abstract - highlights mine:


> The Graphical Overview of the Social and Semantic Interactions of People (GOSSIP) is a software tool developed by Defence Research and Development Canada – Toronto (DRDC Toronto). The program is designed to help the operator/analyst develop a fast and accurate impression of the relationships among entities (people, places, organizations) discussed in document collections that are too large to read through in a reasonable amount of time. Over the past few years, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries have developed and delivered a training program for Afghan National Police (ANP) members. The ANP are considered by some to be unprofessional, inept, corrupt, and as having little positive effect on the local population's sense of security in their communities. These qualities of the ANP were explored using GOSSIP by examining an open source media collection prepared for analysts and commanders in Kandahar Airfield (KAF). *We found that when the ANP was discussed in the media updates provided to Task Force Kandahar (TFK) commanders, it was very often in a positive way. In particular, discussion about NATO’s role in professionalizing the ANP dominated articles about the ANP. We propose that the extent to which the ANP is discussed in positively toned articles might lead the target audience for these articles to have an unduly positive impression of the ANP.* GOSSIP is a prototype. It needs to be developed further to allow it to be used as a web-based device on a network. Future work should also enhance the tool by providing it with the ability to scrape information from various sources without the user having to load documents manually.



From the executive summary:


> Introduction or background: The Graphical Overview of the Social and Semantic Interactions of People (GOSSIP) is a software tool developed by Defence Research and Development Canada – Toronto (DRDC Toronto). The program is designed to help the operator/analyst develop a fast and accurate impression of the relationships among entities (people, places, organizations) discussed in document collections that are too large to read through in a reasonable amount of time. Over the past few years, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries have developed and delivered a training program for Afghan National Police (ANP) members. *The ANP are considered by some to be unprofessional, inept, corrupt, and as having little positive effect on the local population's sense of security in their communities. These qualities of the ANP were explored using GOSSIP by examining an open source media collection prepared for analysts
> and commanders in Kandahar Airfield.*
> 
> Results: We found that *when the ANP was discussed in the media updates provided to Task Force Kandahar commanders, it was very often in a positive way. In particular, discussion about NATO’s role in professionalizing the ANP dominated articles about the ANP.*
> ...



I find the conclusion ("when the ANP was discussed in the media updates provided to Task
Force Kandahar commanders, it was very often in a positive way") surprising.  The paper says "the open source media collection used for this study consisted of approximately two year's (2009 – 2011) worth of news articles from Afghan and International sources ....  prepared for analysts and commanders in Kandahar Airfield (KAF) .... "  

So, does this paper tell us more about the GOSSIP system, what the articles contained, what the media had to say in general or how the articles for the "media updates provided to TF Kandahar commanders" were chosen?


----------

