Still catching up after yesterday's successful event from the virtual newsroom of the American University in Cairo with James K. Glassman the US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, which was noteworthy -- at a minimum -- in that it was the first time a US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy appeared in a virtual space via their avatar. Hats off to Mr. Glassman for taking the risk and encouraging the State Department to move confidently into use of modern technologies for outreach. Glassman also had an interesting exchange with the Egyptian bloggers, which resulted a back-channel Twitter thread that the bloggers conducted outside Second Life and the global chat channel. We'll write more, including video and trascript. In the meantime I've done a bit of catch-up on my backlog of readings.
Al Jazeera Releases Creative Commons licensed images from Gaza.
This is amazing. I've been tuning back into Al Jazeera since the amazing series by Josh Rushing and the ongoing conflict in Gaza. For all the criticism against them, Al Jazeera continues to surprise. And I'm excited to follow this more closely.
My friend Parag Khanna has kicked out two new columns in the past week of note:
In January 8 op-ed "Don't squander worldwide feeling of hope for America" (co-authored with BDA's Keith Reinhard" he pulls out a point we've been keen on for years and I'm really pleased to see expressed with regard to how to fix the US public diplomacy enterprise. The essay is an easy read and while it replicates some previous ideas, namely that an independent public diplomacy organization be created, he emphasizes the value of facility with technology, especially:
we need a nimble new tech-savvy, nonprofit organization that more readily can combine public- and private-sector expertise and resources in areas such as new media and state-of-the-art communications. This organization needs to be outside the State Department in order to attract nongovernment actors who could help repair America's damaged reputation but who may not want to be officially associated with U.S. foreign policy.
As a great follow to the above, in a January 12 essay, An Agenda for Obama's CTO (co-authored by Ayesha Khanna) which offers advice on which and how President Obama might choose a CT:
Who might assume the CTO role? Among the reported contenders are Hewlett-Packard CTO Shane Robison; Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf; and Vivek Kundra, CTO of Washington, D.C. But plucking a well-known executive as the government's tech guru will not substitute for continuous public-private collaboration to ensure that innovations are adapted to the government setting. Areas where discussions would be especially useful range from building energy-efficient infrastructures such as green data centers and cloud computing to providing citizens online government services using Web 2.0 technologies.
And, just in time for government appointees and the inauguration, the GAO releases what has been an almost annual call for the past several years for improved investment in US public diplomacy in a press release listing top "Urgent Issues" for the next president and Congress.
Oddly, though I've now seen a number of lists gossiping about upcoming appointees at the State Department, noticeably absent from those lists have been predictions about the public diplomacy appointments. I've been in a number of conversations where I've seen names floated, none of them surprising, which was kind of a disappointment. (We need innovation in public diplomacy, not conventionality.) Given the constant call for focus on public diplomacy, and since public diplomacy is now, still officially in the State Department why aren't the foreign policy blogs mentioning public diplomacy candidates? To wit, in Hillary Clinton's confirmation hearing today soon-to-be-Secretary Clinton mentioned as one of her priorities "smart power," which is yet another evolved state of the term public diplomacy that has gained traction since I first heard it floated back in 2004.
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