As I previously noted, the State Department is making a commendable effort to use new social networking services to reach out to the public and build support for U.S. foreign policy. The State Department now has a blog and is making use of the Twitter and Facebook social networks. In this report in The New York Times, Noam Cohen descrbes how the State Department is using an internal wiki to share information in a way that is changing the bureaucratic culture:
The decision to embrace wikis is part of a changing ethic at the department, from a "need to know culture" to a "need to share culture," said Daniel Sheerin, deputy director of eDiplomacy, which was created in 2003. "This is a technological manifestation of a policy difference," he said, a change he dated to when Colin L. Powell was secretary of state.
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The advantage of Diplopedia, she said, isn't necessarily the ease of creating new material, but the ease in finding information. "The political section used to keep biographies on political people, and the economics people kept biographies on economics people," she said. "It was not always up to date. You didn't always know what the other had."
At a time when there is almost a universal sentiment that the U.S. needs to return to traditional diplomacy after having overemphasized the use of military power, any collaborative tool that can get timely information into the hands of diplomats in the field is a step in the right direction.