# Goals You know from our [Story](/about/story.md) that this project is all about innovation in national security, two words about which there is much debate and very little understanding, much less concrete value or clear opportunities. For that reason, we have a few primary goals that we hope to achieve or at least advance toward with this work: 1. Increase **understanding** of the national security innovation ecosystem. 2. Improve **data literacy** of national security stakeholders, especially government employees, in order to support further innovation. 3. Support a **learning mindset** and **opportunities to experiment** by integrating a variety of frameworks for building and questioning. These are certainly not very specific goals, nor are they very measurable, so it is worth taking a look at each one individually to see how they might be further refined and measured. ### Increase Understanding of the Ecosystem When we think about this overarching goal, our minds immediately go to users and value: * Who do we want to better understand the ecosystem? * Why is increased understanding valuable to them? * How will we create or capture value to meet that need? Our hypotheses about these different questions are captured in [Use Cases](/about/use-cases.md), but we plan to return and add more SMART-style goals. We expect [Feedback](/about/feedback.md) will help with this as well. ### Improve Data Literacy The topic of data literacy is gaining traction within the national security community as more and more users seek to apply data-enabled capabilities to their activities, be they analytics or artificial intelligence or security factors. Our experience (and also [Research](/learning/research.md)) strongly supports the need for improved data literacy to adapt to the changing global environment, especially in national security and in developing innovative approaches or solutions. More and more we are overcome by data and unable to advance (especially those of us in [Government](/about/use-cases/government.md)) because we may lack access to simple [Tools](/learning/tools.md) or our understanding of seemingly technical [Concepts](/learning/concepts.md) is not well-founded in [Research](/learning/research.md). We may not have experience with [Courses](/learning/courses.md) that could address this and might feel overwhelmed at the number and variety of options that are available. By taking a project-based approach, the creation of which adds value on its own, we hope to inspire, connect, and empower people to seek out opportunities to improve their knowledge, gain experience working with data and associated technologies, and bring others with them. ### Support a Learning Mindset We feel that a learning mindset is important to support broader innovation initiatives because, as you may have experienced yourself, innovative efforts often fail, but failure and national security have a history of not playing well together (turns out national security is a bit of a bully). By setting this out as a goal, we hope people will take these failures and start to ingest them as learnings instead of character flaws. Not all failure is good, to be sure, and we do not believe that there is any one-size-fits-all approach to innovation or a "fail fast" mentality that will be easily and universally adopted. It takes [People](/about/goals/people.md) for that kind of change to occur, and it is those same [People](/about/goals/people.md) who are also [Contributors](/about/support/contributors.md) or even just consumers of this project that will be the change agents needed to keep moving us forward in a very complex world. We think that the [Education](/about/goals/education.md) opportunities are important, not just to [#improve-data-literacy](#improve-data-literacy "mention"), but for personal growth and a sense of fulfilment regardless of one's job or position. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.natsec.io/about/goals.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.