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Diplomatic Advocates Online

I read a really interesting idea in an article on digital diplomacy in The New York Times magazine section one week ago. The article was about Jared Cohen and Alec Ross, two State department employees who are taking digital to new horizons. The former is the youngest member of the State Department’s policy planning staff and the latter is the first senior adivser for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Twitter is a mainstay of their assault on diplomacy red tape and I was surprised by the remarkable amount of freedom they have to change public affairs through social networking. Kudos to Hillary Clinton for letting their digital diplomacy flow. They are truly advocates for the next generation of politics.

The article mentioned their “techdels” which are technology delegations that they lead in various countries. As the article points out, they invite software engineers, entrepreneurs and tech CEOs to come together and think of innovative ways to support democracy and spread the word about freedom.  One example they give is figuring out how to crowd source an end to human trafficking in Russia.

The article mentioned one idea that came up in a meeting with billionnaire Carlos Slim. The techdel was musing about how people in Mexico City all have cell phones and text all the time, no matter how poor they are. Someone suggested the idea of having a short text code to report a crime. The SMS would strip out all personal information but the reported crime would show up in a database that the police could monitor and the public could see mapped online. The idea is that these advocate crime reporters would be anonymous but crime around the world would be more transparent and possibly stoppable. As an advocacy idea, this is a good one.  Thought it was worth mentioning here.