Darren Krape

Public Media Camp: Hubs and Spokes and a Look at Measurement

Darren — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:41:48 +0000

Recently I had the pleasure to participate in the Public Media Camp, an unconference focused on strengthening local and national public broadcasting. A good portion of the discussion focused on the disruptive and new opportunities being presented by Internet-based dissemination and social media.

Of Hubs and Spokes

While the focus on social media related well to my work in public diplomacy, the very structure of public media actually seems quite similar to the hub and spoke model of the central State Department in Washington and the various embassies, consulates and missions scattered around the world. As with public broadcasting, content is produced and disseminated in Washington and the very diverse missions overseas. Just as NPR or PBS in Washington balances the needs of their direct national audience with the needs of their affiliate stations, the State Department also has to support an international audience for its America.gov properties while meeting overseas mission needs.

Additionally, most public media outlets focus more on informing audiences and social change than increasing profits. Public diplomacy has similar goals: changing perceptions about the United States’ and its policies and creating a better environment for U.S. goals, such as democratization, improving religious freedoms and so on. Without profits as a baseline metric, both organizations aim for more intangible goals, such as those elucidated above. This makes measurement more challenging, with related knock-on effects.

Measuring Impact

Fortunately, public media and affiliated organizations are taking on a number of these challenges, most especially measurement. The Fledgling Fund, an NGO focused on helping social change projects get off the ground, has done quite a bit of work figuring out how to measure such an amorphous goal as creating social impact. Drawing from their experience, they’ve created a five-stage model which helps measure social impact of a program.

Here are the steps (scroll down for a diagram):

Media quality: Most basically, this stage asks if the subject is a quality piece of media? Are the characters strong and well defined? Is the story well-toned? Will it get press attention, resonate with viewers, generate online buzz and so on?
Raising public awareness: Where is the topic in the public consciousness? Some topics don’t need more more widespread attention, so media focused solely on raising awareness isn’t necessary. However, some topics are not well known, so a basic introduction or media focused on moving beyond the choir may be necessary.
Increased public engagement: There is the largest leap in the five stages, moving from awareness to engagement. Essentially, this is the leap from passive attention (viewing a film, reading a web site) to active engagement (promoting the film to friends, commenting on a web site). Reaching this state indicates a change in attitudes, beliefs and behaviors.
Stronger social movement: At this stage, people have moved from low level engagement to greater collective action. If the media engaged the choir, then they’ve become more creative or effective after engaging with your media. If the media reached new audiences, then they’ve joined existing organizations or created their own to reach the goals elucidated in your media.
Social change: This is the ultimate goal and, often, the most difficult to reach. At this stage the media has encouraged policy or legislative change, a tangible shift in the public dialog on the topic or influential changes in citizen or consumer behavior.

This model seems to suit public diplomacy media efforts well, though it would require some time spent on teasing out the specific measures, qualitative and quantitative, for each step. The Fledgling Fund has a good whitepaper on the model (PDF) that delves much deeper while also providing some useful real-world case studies.

There were a few more gems from the public media camp that I hope to write-up in the next week or so.

False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World

Darren — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 17:44:13 +0000

False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World

False Economy, a new book by Financial Times writer Alan Beattie is both ambitious in its geographic and historical scope and quite reserved in drawing monumental judgments. Written for a the general reader, it is light on the economic theory and, when raised, explained clearly and succinctly.

The book’s basic treatise could be summarized thus: a nation’s economic fortunes rise or fall based on a wide variety of variables, typically due to domestic actions and often not those promoted by conventional wisdom. Over the course of the book, Beattie rejects many oft-blamed reasons for nations staying poor: religion, culture, natural resources and other such stalwarts. His reasoning is frequently compelling, rarely relying on abstract economic theory, instead elucidating his point through provocatively eye-opening examples.

Efficient Corruption?

Julius Nyerere, former Tanzanian president

Take corruption: as many non-profits and intergovernmental organizations (such as the World Bank and United Nations) argue, corruption is one of the main reasons why many counties fail to grow. While this is partly accurate, the complete truth is much more complicated. In an early chapter, Beattie asks why Tanzania remained poor under a scrupulously honest leader while Indonesia was relatively enriched under the notoriously corrupt Suharto regime. While he underscores how all corruption is a drain on an economy, he draws a distinction between different types of corruption and how the differences can have a considerable impact on how an economy functions. Although Suharto, a former general, was famously corrupt, he was able to solidify his government’s power across the country, ensuring that the corruption was relatively regularized and efficient. Put simply, you only had to bribe one official to get things moving forward. Coupled with a relatively free market, the corruption acted largely as a consistent tax on business.

In stark contrast, Tanzania’s president, Julius Nyerere, was a former teacher and, by all accounts, an honest leader. He nonetheless presided over a largely collectivist economy permeated by corruption at all levels, ensuring each step forward required yet more pay-offs to corrupt officials. Eventually, each step became sufficiently painful that most people gave up and returned to a meager life of subsistence farming. In both cases, corruption was rife, but in only one example did corruption significantly stifle economic growth.

Other Myths of Development Theory

Beattie efficiently deals with other myths of development theory. If certain religions, as argued of late about Islam, are such barriers to growth (or, inversely, regularly cited as supportive of economic actively, such as Protestantism), why are there so many examples in history of rich Islamic nations and poor Protestant ones? In most cases, Beattie argues that it is necessary to look at the individual actors and the environment in which they are functioning to see the underlying reasons for economic growth or retardation. In one situation where religion (or culture, geography and so on) could be seen as an impediment, in another it may provide a competitive advantage, or, indeed, have little influence at all.

Critique

While each argument is cogent and feels well supported by president day or historical examples, False Economy nonetheless has two flaws. First, the globe-trotting, time-traveling choice of examples lends a certain disjointedness to the narrative. On one page, you could be introduced to such disparate individuals as Russian Tsars, corrupt Indonesian bureaucrats, Argentine plantation owners and English industrialists. The swiftness many of these subjects are raised, used for comparison and discarded can be dizzying and raises concerns that they’ve been cherry-picked from a world of alternative choices. Without greater exposition of each, or preexisting knowledge, the reader is forced to take such comparisons at face value.

The second criticism is that the book never really comes to a cohesive conclusion. While the subtitle of the book, “A Surprising Economic History of the World”, suggests a primary underlying narrative, there is little to tie the various constituent parts together. Each chapter feels only marginally connected to the others, tackling the ascribed subject but never drawing strong or consistent parallels between them (beyond the aforementioned caution against blindly following conventional economic wisdom). Indeed, the brief final chapter introduces another example, a short analysis of the WTO and failed Doha rounds, rather than providing any real conclusion. If anything, in this chapter Beattie acknowledges this lack of clarity, stating, “I don’t know what the exact answers are [to economic growth], but anyone who claims she does should not be trusted.” Stating this point earlier in the book perhaps could have dissipated the nagging question as to when Beattie was going to state his central thesis.

Verdict

Despite these two quite minor criticisms, False Economy is a compelling read, most especially for the numerous gems of insight scattered throughout. I’ve already mentioned a couple here, but there are others well worth highlighting. Below is one of my favorite.

The Danger of Populous Capital Cities

Pierre L’Enfant's original plan for Washington D.C.

For most of it’s history, Washington DC was a sleepy backwater, noted more for stifling heat than vibrant culture. Surprisingly, for a country that pioneered democratic governance, the District’s six hundred thousand residents lack voting representation in Congress, largely disenfranchising the city’s population in the federal government. Yet, is it possible that the District’s small population and disenfranchisement actually helped stabilize the greater country?

As Beattie points out, countries where the residents of a nation’s capital city hold disproportionate sway over the central government tend to be much more unstable. Through their votes, or more often mass protests, residents of the capital tend to skew national priorities toward the capital at the expense of the rest of the country. This encourages more people to move to the capital, further distorting the central governments priorities, and the feedback loop strengthens. Examples of this behavior litter history, from the destructive rent-seeking of ancient Rome to the back-and-forth mass protests of modern-day Bangkok. Beattie sums this tendency with the following statistic, “In countries with a history of stable democracy, an average of 23 percent of the urban population lives in the central city; in unstable dictatorships with a history of coups and revolutions, the figure is 37 percent.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, even autocrats are appreciating the potential benefits of removing a government from undue influence caused by a large population a the capital’s doorstep. Naypyidaw, the newly built capital of Burma, was specifically located outside the relative political ferment of Yangon. Beattie however doesn’t touch on how such moves by dictatorial regimes who use the same strategy to avoid (potentially legitimate) grievances.

Despite the benefits of limiting local influence on a national government, Beattie fortunately (at least for me, a District resident) suggests that the democratic tradition is sufficiently well rooted in the United States that Washingtonians should, finally, be given the vote.

There are plenty of other equally intriguing stories through the book, beyond those mentioned here, so I highly suggest reading False Economy. Don’t expect a well argued plan for economic development and you can sit back and enjoy many clever and unexpected examples from the pages of economic history.

CSS drop-down menus: keeping the top level selected when hovering over a sub-menu, now in jQuery

Darren — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 15:17:38 +0000

Awhile back I wrote a JavaScript tutorial on how to keep the top level menu item selected when hovering over a drop down menu. Since then I’ve become a strong user and proponent of the JavaScript library jQuery. Not only is it easy to use, it also can help simplify your code-base very significantly. I’ve explained the updated code below. As you can see, it is much simpler.

How this works

There are two main components of the JavaScript, first the code for all browsers to keep the top level selected and a second code block to add the hover state for IE6 (since it only supports :hover pseudo-classes on anchors, not list elements as we use here).

First, you’ll need to add the jQuery equivalent of “onLoad”: $(function() {. Fortunately, the multiple onLoad and caching issues we addressed in the earlier tutorial are now handled in jQuery, so no need to use the “onEvent” function from the earlier tutorial. You’ll also sometimes see this as $(document).ready(function() {. The functionality is the same, so feel free to use either syntax.

Code for persistent top-level menu formatting

Next, the general code for maintaining the hover formatting on the top level. Basically, this function iterates through each of the drop-down

hover

$("#menu ul").each(function(i){
  $(this).hover(function(){
    $(this).parent().find("a").slice(0,1).addClass("active");
  },function(){
    $(this).parent().find("a").slice(0,1).removeClass("active");
  });
});

Internet Explorer 6 functionality

To make this work in IE6, we need to add some additional code. First, we use jQuery’s built in browser sniffer to only target MSIE versions below 7. It then works fundimentally like the code above and the Suckerfish drop downs from the earlier tutorial. JavaScript cycles through each drop-down

if($.browser.msie && ($.browser.version < 7)) {
  $("#menu").each(function(i){
    $(this).find("li").hover(function(){
      $(this).addClass("sfhover");
    },function(){
      $(this).removeClass("sfhover");
    });
  });
}

In closing

Be sure to add the closing parenthesize and bracket for the jQuery on ready state: });.

Complete Code






  
  Menu Example

  

  

  





  
    Styles

    
      Red/White
      Ros?©/Blush
      Sparkling
      Dessert
      Fortified
      Fruit
      Ice Wine
    

    
    Whites

    
      Albari?±o
      Chardonnay
      Chenin blanc
      Muscat
      Pinot blanc
      Pinot gris
      Riesling
      Sauvignon blanc 
      S?©millon
    

    
    Reds

    
      Cabernet Sauvignon 
      Malbec 
      Merlot 
      Pinot noir 
      Syrah/Shiraz 
      Zinfandel
    

    
    Noted Regionals

    
      Amarone
      Beaujolais
      Burgundy 
      Chianti 
      Madeira 
      Port 
      Sancerre 
      Tokaji 
      Vinho Verde 
    

    
    Key Countries

    
      France
      Italy
      Spain
      United States
      Argentina
      Australia
      South Africa

Public Diplomacy: From the Cold War to the Current Era, Part I

Darren — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:33:19 +0000

Visitors stream into the 1959 American National Exhibition. Moscow, USSR

Fifty years ago this month, on a muddy rain-soaked field in Moscow, a glittering pavilion quickly rose and a massive geodesic dome swiftly took shape. After only a few months of hectic construction the 1959 American National Exhibition opened to a curious Soviet public. The exhibit provided a unique window on American life to the millions of people who filed through the event over the next few weeks. The visitors saw examples of contemporary American life, from cars to homes to art. Young American guides, many barely out of college, led the curious Soviet public through both the general American story as well as their own deeply personal stories of life in the United States and, in many cases, how their immigrant families became American citizens.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev chats with a guide. Vice President Richard M. Nixon is at left.

Soon after opening the 1959 Exhibition hosted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who toured the exhibits with then Vice President Richard Nixon. In what became a touchstone of the early Cold War, these cold warriors verbally sparred in the kitchen of the model American home. Both leaders argued for the merits of each country’s unique civil and economic models in front of an inquisitive crowd and, more importantly, rolling news cameras. The “Kitchen Debate” as it came to be known, informed the opinions of the two leaders and provided one of the most compelling unscripted moments of the long conflict.

Beyond the statecraft practiced in front of the cameras, public diplomacy was the chief goal of the Exhibition. The hope was greater understanding brought about by the cultural exchange would lessen tensions between the two great nations, turning enemies into, at least, adversaries. The personal stories of the guides were meant to show the diversity of the country while the various displays sought to highlight the strength of a capitalist economy.

Was the event a success?

Did the Exhibition influence Soviet perceptions of the United States, and, by extension help America reach its policy objectives? Answering these questions, and many others, was the goal of the Face-Off to Facebook conference held last week at George Washington University. Opinions varied among the conference participants, who ranged from Exhibition staff members to representatives of the Moscow public to various academics, but most concluded the event was a qualified success.

William Safire, formerly a Nixon staff member, and now a New York Times columnist, took pains to expose the “gold colored fog” through which we now see the Cold War. At the time, American’s were quite apprehensive of how the conflict was proceeding and there were real concerns that the US could lose the war. In this context, the expo was quite successful in giving the United States a voice in Moscow, particularly when the kitchen debate gave Nixon a unique chance to speak directly for America on Soviet state-controlled television.

Guides to America

A guide demonstrates an American style kitchen

Many of the speakers and panelists focused on the unique role of the American guides, helping educate visitors about the United States. Barely out of college, these young Russian-speaking men and women discussed a wide range of topics with Muscovites, from the personal to the political. Importantly, they were not given strict talking points, allowing them to speak freely about their own perspectives and opinions, even if they ran counter (and they often did) to established American policy. Indeed, this freedom to speak meant the guides were personally engaging and underscored for the Exhibition visitors America’s willingness to support a multitude of differing voices, something quite unique in Soviet Moscow.

A Russian Perspective

Intriguingly, the conference also included representatives speaking to the Russian perspective. Sergei Khrushchev, son of Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and now a professor at Brown University, spoke both from his personal perspective as a young boy attending the Exhibition and on reactions from other Russian attendees he interviewed. For him and his peers, it was the handouts (pamphlets, books, samples of American drinks and food) that were the most tangible and memorable aspects of the expo. The cars, model American home, and other displays were simply out-of-reach to the average Soviet citizen, and, they assumed, were out of reach to the average American citizen as well. As such, while these items were interesting, Professor Khrushchev argued they were also largely dismissed.

Professor Khrushchev also emphasized the importance of the guides on helping to reframe perspectives on the United States, again speaking to the importance of personal engagement to public diplomacy. For Clay Shirky, a professor from New York University, it was this “convening” function that was the key aspect of the Exhibition, a function long at the core of truly successful public diplomacy programs.

Visitors in the glass pavilion. The Exhibition featured a wide variety of American modern art, from paintings to sculptures.

Amusingly, the Exhibition also highlighted some areas of agreement amongst the Americans and Russians, most particularly a shared distaste of the modern art. Soviet journalists routinely questioned the artists’ sanity, while American Congressman merely accused them of being, ironically, “card carrying communists”.

In the end, the Exhibition was a remarkable achievement. Considering the vast logistical and political barriers that stood in its way, it is a feat that if even took place. The sheer scope was also a triumph: a vast complex of buildings seen by 2.7 million visitors. More critically, it helped inform Soviet perspectives on the United State while also providing a venue for the historically important debate between Khrushchev and Nixon.

However, as noted by George Feifer, a writer and former guide, whatever progress was made by the Exhibition and related summits, proved short-lived. All the steps forward came crashing down with Gary Powers’ ill-fated U2 flight in 1960. For Feifer, these two events stress the United States’ dangerous, and counter-productive, dependence on military power and the under-emphasis on productive, peaceful public diplomacy.

Later this week, I will post part 2, which looks at public diplomacy in the 21st Century and explores parallels between the 1959 Exhibition and modern PD.

Lessons on Social Media Campaigns from Politics Online

Darren — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:23:21 +0000

Recently I attended the Politics Online Conference put on by George Washington University’s Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. Although I was only able to sit in on a handful of sessions, there were a number of very useful gems on how you can use social media to further political campaign goals. I’ve focused on the lessons most useful for public diplomacy campaigns.

One of the major themes of the conference is the necessity to create authentic engagement when using social media. Without creating this authenticity, it is much more difficult to influence the intended audience since there is little personal connection with the message. Many lobbyists regularly emphasized that a handful of authentic, personal messages from constituents are more convincing than a mass quantity of relatively anonymous messages. Furthermore, genuine engagement between two parties (in this case politicians and constituents) can help create lasting communities and movements centered around specific causes, even if the engagement is conducted online.

Ideally this authenticity is created through direct personal engagement, a local focus and a tangible result. One example given was a campaign to influence legislation covering local food producers. To highlight the importance of these producers in local constituencies, a lobbyist organization used an online campaign to help local producers deliver care packages of non-perishable goods to their representatives. By using web-based technologies to make the constituent’s concerns tangible, the lobbyists were able to influence the final legislation to greater benefit local producers.

Many of the presenters also cautioned that campaigns can’t simply present themselves as grassroots and authentic, without actually engaging real people in the effort. Web users have gotten increasingly sophisticated and can often easily spot fake campaigns (otherwise known as “astroturfing”, a play on real “grassroots”). If a fake campaign is spotted, the repercussions can be serious and severely damage the credibility of the sponsoring organization.

A few other tips I found useful:

If you can’t create your own parade, get in front of one. This was in response to a question asking if you didn’t have Obama, or a similarly motivational individual or cause, what can be done to get more attention to your campaign. One great suggestion was to track trends and get in front of ones that relate to your effort. This means it is important to track trends, such as through Twitter or Google, and see which ones are getting more attention. When adding related photos, Tweets, blog posts and so on, be sure to find out what tags are being used and label your content as such. For example, one of the sites I work on had put together a wealth of information on avian flu, pandemics, global health care and so on. While many of that was off the radar for many months, with the recent spread of H1N1, much of this content is now highly relevant to the global conversation on swine flu. As many have said before, “never waste a good crisis”.
No media works in a vacuum. In basically every media market, no single form of media functions without at least some relation to other types. Newspapers influence TV and vise versa, while a scandal might break on Twitter or Facebook before making it to the nightly news broadcast. As such, you have to consider all dominant (and perhaps some not so dominant) media channels in your engagement programs. Ideally, all media campaigns should have integrated components across many forms of media, each tailored to the medium’s specific requirements. It is no longer possible to see a campaign as strictly a TV commercial, since that commercial may be recorded on a mobile phone, reposted on YouTube and then shared via Twitter. For that same reason, it is also important to monitor a wide variety of media for mentions, even if there isn’t any specific engagement taking place in them.
Meeting in person is still – and always will be – the most influential type of engagement. It is far harder to be inauthentic, impersonal and non-transparent when meeting face to face. The sheer amount of information conveyed in the tone of a person’s voice, the way they present themselves and the messages they convey in the meeting makes personal connections far more moving than any other type of connection. As one presenter put it, “There is no substitute for a personal meeting with a member of congress.”

Redirecting blog URLs in Wordpress MU using .htaccess and mod_rewrite

Darren — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:43:56 +0000

Recently, one of the blogs I help support wanted to change its name and location. This meant changing the virtual directory name in the URL as well. Typically, simply changing the directory name in the WordPress settings would break all incoming links, something we definitely wanted to avoid.

Fortunately, it is very easy to change the directory and seamlessly redirect users to the new site by editing the “.htaccess” file at the root of your blog.

Simply add the following line:

RewriteRule ^olddirectory(.*) newdirectory$1 [L,R]

So, in my case, I was redirecting from the old blog called “Campaign” to a new one called “Obama”, so my addition looks like this:

RewriteRule ^campaign(.*) obama$1 [R,L]

For the most part this is self-explanatory if you are familiar with regular expressions. The caret is an anchor signaling the start of the redirect directory and the (.*) is a catch-all, ensuring everything following the old directory will be included in the redirect.

The “[R,L]” at the end are flags to, first, force the redirect and, second, to show that is the end of the redirection in that particular RewriteRule. Both flags are required.

Apache has detailed documentation on using RewriteRule, including specifics on the use of flags.

Facebook Diplomacy

Darren — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:35:30 +0000

From Reader’s Digest, the challenges of Facebook Diplomacy.

Special thanks to Molly Moran (and her Mom) for sending this to me.

Smith-Mundt and Domestic Dissemination

Darren — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 03:13:38 +0000

Photo by Yael Swerdlow

This post grew out of the recent Smith-Mundt Symposium, though since the conference was about a month ago, it is a bit late to the party. Several individuals have already written good summaries of the day’s discussion, so I direct you to those first.

That being said, there are a few points relating to the general conversation on Smith-Mundt and public diplomacy/strategic communications that are worth making (or reiterating).

First my general read-out of the event is that the issue remains quite contentious and with little overall agreement. Many argue the law should be kept, or even strengthened (and its remit expanded to the entire U.S. government) while others argue it should be completely repealed. A third group feel the argument is pointless since the law is out-dated and should be ignored, which can be done since, in the end, there are no “Smith-Mundt police” to arrest anyone for violating the law.

Smith-Mundt is a multi-faceted piece of legislation, dealing with the structure of public diplomacy, creating cultural exchanges, as well as the much argued ban on domestic distribution. Since the latter restriction has become the most contentious part of the act, I will focus my summary and comments here.

Position One: A Stronger Ban on Domestic Distribution

During the discussion, the first group pointed to several cases where the U.S. government attempted to “propagandize” the American public to argue for expanding the law. The two most prominent examples being the Department of Defense’s efforts to influence Iraq news coverage and the fictional reporter Karen Ryan who promoted government the Bush administration’s Medicare program.

Another camp that supports the continuation of Smith-Mundt are, interestingly, those working in the government on public diplomacy and strategic communication. For them, Smith-Mundt protects their from the over-zealous members of the public criticizing their products. For example, it allows the government to be self critical without being brought before Congress and accused of wasting tax-payer dollars on products that make the United States look bad. This is a consideration since the products produced by the U.S. government for public diplomacy are created with a foreign audience in mind and designed to their interests. So content tailored for an audience in Cuba may prove discordant to domestic Cuban-Americans. Having to please both a domestic and foreign audience, who may have widely divergent views of the United States and its values, is likely to result in material that resonates with neither audience.

Position Two: Abolishing the Ban on Domestic Distribution

For those who think Smith-Mundt should be abolished, there seem to be three main threads, two related to the lack of domestic oversight.

First, because there is no domestic distribution of these products, the work of these units in the government are pretty much invisible to the U.S. taxpayer. Unless you are in the intelligence business, you don’t want to be invisible to the hand that feeds you come budget time. Since there is no domestic awareness of these programs, there are no advocates for this type of work in Congress, so public diplomacy programs covered under Smith-Mundt are often marginalized and thusly poorly resourced.

The second side-effect of the lack of domestic oversight is you lose the expertise of the American public. This should not be understated, the U.S. is a diverse country with many first and second generation immigrants. These individuals have nuanced understanding of their originating country and culture. Having them contribute to information programs, either by commenting on existing products or suggesting new avenues of engagement, could make these efforts more relevant and resonant to focus populations.

The last argument for abolishing Smith-Mundt is that it restricts the ability of the U.S. government to engage the domestic population in public diplomacy programs. For example, many have pointed to public to public exchanges (either in person or online) as a key method for creating greater understanding between cultures. However, since helping to coordinate such efforts could include distributing government-funded information to domestic audiences, this activity could come under the perview of Smith-Mundt restrictions.

Position Three: Ignoring Smith-Mundt

The last group of commentators basically argue that Smith-Mundt is outdated and, since there is no history of enforcement, can safely be ignored. This contingent seems to be largely made up retired foreign service officers. In their work overseas, Smith-Mundt never came up and, as such, was soundly ignored.

Since there is little provision for enforcement, and no one has been prosecuted for running afoul of Smith-Mundt, those working in Washington can also safely ignore the act and go about their daily business.

My Take

The question of domestic distribution is a challenging one and I can appreciate the arguments on both sides. There certainly needs to be some restriction on domestic propaganda, as evidenced by the actions of the Department of Defense and the Bush administration’s fake reporter. However, in this increasingly transparent world, such a restriction should be largely unnecessary since dishonest efforts like these will almost certainly unmasked. Such programs make the government look underhanded and untrustworthy, thus doing more harm than good. Any agency that professes transparency while willfully trying to mislead the public (foreign or domestic) shouldn’t be communicating in the first place.

The question of oversight is, for me, more tricky. For every individual who’s unique cultural understanding can benefit information programs, there is another who will angrily disagree with a product, and quite willing to take this quarrel to their Congressperson. How to balance the positive and negative influences of domestic oversight is a key question without an easy answer. Much of it will come down to, first, education, explaining the methods and goals of public diplomacy, and, second, demonstrating the context in which an information campaign is being delivered.

In the end however, I feel Smith-Mundt does need to be revisited with new legislation for one key reason: information is global, in a way never envisioned by the original drafters of the act. Restricting the distribution of a book or movie was easy when it was intricately tied to a physical medium (a rivalrous good, to use an economist term). Now, something the government publishes on the web for a foreign audience, is available anywhere, easily recopied and quickly disseminated further. And that introduces significant ambiguity in those engaging in public diplomacy online. For example, could tailoring a website to rank higher in search rankings be considered domestic dissemination since all of the most popular engines have large numbers of American users?

Ultimately, I think the real goal here should be transparency. The main objective with the ban on domestic dissemination is to prevent the U.S. government from surreptitiously influencing the American public. If viewers, domestic and foreign, are fore-warned that the content they are viewing was created by the government, they can then make their own judgments as to its veracity. After all, when delivering information on United States’ policy, how is the work of public diplomats all that different from public affairs officials? Certainly public diplomacy and public affairs are two different activities, but, in the end, their goal is to inform, and thereby influence, public opinion.

Besides, to be a credible voice, the government needs to be honest and open. If something is produced by the government or with government money, it should be stated as such. Perhaps Smith-Mundt 2.0 should be one line: “Information programs funded by the government should be identified as such, and strive for honesty, objectivity and transparency.”

As Edward R Murrow, journalist and former director of the United States Information Agency once said, “To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.”

Blogging the Middle East

Darren — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 03:58:46 +0000

Last week, Marc Lynch (also known as Abu Aardvark), an associate professor of political science and international relations at The George Washington University and well-known writer and blogger about the Middle East, gave a fantastic presentation to my bureau at the State Department. He was kind enough to allow me to summarize his presentation and share it with the wider community.

His presentation, and the following discussion, focused on his personal experience as a blogger, including his engagement with counterpart bloggers in the Middle East, and on the general history and landscape of blogging in the Middle East.

A History of Blogging in the Middle East

In his presentation, Professor Lynch focused on three main phases of blogging in the Middle East:

Initially, many of the blogs in the Middle East were written in English and focused on the American audience. Some commentators called them “bridge” bloggers, in that they provided a bridge between the perspectives of the Middle Eastern authors and the American readers. However, as these bloggers became more popular in the United States, they began to tailor their message to very specific audiences, typically either quite conservative or liberal. The same commentators then began derisively referring to them as “mirror” bloggers, since they often reflected what their audiences wanted to hear about, re-enforcing existing biases.
The second phase, which reached its zenith around 2005, saw many activists become prominent bloggers who focused largely on internal social change. These blogs were written in local languages and dialects and the audience was typically domestic. Often these bloggers were local elites, many Western-educated, and were already established activists before turning to blogging as an outlet.

These activists wrote about police brutality, restrictions on protest or speech, government corruption and other examples of domestic oppression. Their focus was internal and generally paid little attention to the United States.

Unfortunately, as the prominence of these activists grew through their blogs they increasingly gained the attention of local authorities. Unsurprisingly, once noticed by the oppressive political state, it oppressed them. Many were thrown in jail, some were tortured and the nascent ferment of this movement was crushed.

Despite their hope that their prominence, both domestic and international, would protect them from this oppression, telling, few (or none) of individuals or countries with sufficient influence came to their defense.
Lynch classifies the latest and current phase as the “public sphere enterprise”. Basically this means bloggers engaging in public discussion and argument, but without the expectation that such activity will result in big changes. The bloggers in this phase were always active, but were over-shadowed by the “bridge” and activist bloggers. They are a very small minority, often young elites, and typically talk only to each other. Their blogging won’t be overthrowing oppressive regimes any time soon.

Nonetheless, the ideas they are creating and shaping may have significant ripples in the next 10 to 20 years as many of these individuals rise to positions of power. Importantly, blogging has created channels of communication between some divergent, but equally oppressed groups. In Egypt, for example, blogging has created connections between secular activists and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, to the point that each side will advocate for the other when the state bears down hard.

As important as these connections and ideas are however, the great open, democratic ferment written about in the main stream media is now dormant in the Middle East, successfully cowed by oppressive governments. More and more bloggers are coming online though, so a resurgence may be in the making, sometime in the future.

Public Diplomacy 2.0 in the Middle East: What do to?

Faced with the current Middle East landscape, with oppressive regimes in ascendancy and free-thinking bloggers driven out or to the margins, how should the United States approach web-based public diplomacy?

Lynch highlighted five key lessons and methods that should guide American public diplomacy efforts in the Middle East.

First: Work on broad principals

Most importantly, the United States needs to work on broad principals, such as press freedom and personal rights. It is preferable and almost always better to have local voices pushing for change, which is much harder under oppressive regimes. Furthermore, by picking winners, the U.S. risks turning them into losers and making the situation worse. For example, it makes little sense for the U.S. to create a social network for Arabs since they will, if given the latitude, create their own, better, network, free from U.S. government restrictions.

Second: Don’t be blinded by the tech

It is important not to let the technology blind practitioners to the basics of public diplomacy. It is pointless to depend on blogs, Facebook or other technologies to lead a revolution. Along this line, the U.S. government shouldn’t create exaggerated expectations on what individual bloggers can do. Public diplomacy efforts shouldn’t place too much burden on these voices, especially when there is no way to protect them from an oppressive regime.

Third: Listen

The United States needs to get better at listening. Too much of public diplomacy has been about “winning” and not enough about “understanding”. Developing this capacity to listen and understand should look at the wide range of public opinion, not just the loudest or scariest. Of the material that gets translated and circulated among the highest offices in the U.S. government, a majority is often pulled from jihadist web forums. While important from a security perspective, this massively misrepresents Middle Eastern public opinion, leading to poor understanding and, ultimately, poor policy. Similarly, it is important to listen to a wide array of data points, from newspapers to television, not just blogs (though blogs can suggest what topics are resonating in the wider audience).

Fourth: Understand that “Google rules the world”

It is important to be on the web and, most especially, have material that ranks highly on Google. Professor Lynch gave the example of Al Hurra, the U.S. government-funded Middle East broadcast channel, who refuses to publish their transcripts online and rarely pushes their video to YouTube and other popular outlets. Al Jazeera, in stark contrast, publishes everything, text and video, in a wide variety of venues. The result: Al Jazeera’s content lives forever while Al Hurra’s dies immediately.

Fifth: Encourage open, honest exchange

Lastly, when the U.S. does engage, it needs to be open, transparent and credible. Lynch praised three Department of State public diplomacy programs as fulfilling this requirement: the Digital Outreach Team, which engages in discussions with bloggers in the Middle East, the Democracy Video Contest, an open video competition to complete the phrase “Democracy is…”, and Fulbright and other exchanges.

I want to thank Marc for allowing me to share his thoughts with the wider community and highly suggest you subscribe to his new blog hosted by ForeignPolicy.com.

A Twitter Press Conference That Worked (and the Famous One That Didn’t)

Darren — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:47:08 +0000

This is the first of a planned series on the use of social media in the 2008-2009 Israel-Gaza conflict, largely derived from the examples and articles I’ve collected over the past few weeks.

The Israeli Consulate in New York recently held the first Twitter-based press conference. While it was an interesting experiment, the technology was poorly suited for this sort of activity (read two good critiques from COMOPS and Columbia Journalism Review). As Rachel Maddow pointed out, they were trying to explain a conflict in 140 characters that authors have struggled to decipher in books. Many critiques have been written on this, so I will highlight a counter-example where Twitter proved an excellent medium for delivering press-type engagement.

Sean McCormack, the State Department’s spokesman, twittered (and photographed) his way through the recent negotiations and vote on the UN Security Council’s Gaza cease-fire resolution. His tweets noted the negotiation process all through to the final vote, which passed with the U.S. the lone country abstaining. His updates were interesting on their own, conveying a sense of insider information and a direct connection with the process.

What I found more interesting though, was immediately after the vote, several people asked McCormack, via Twitter, why the U.S. chose to abstain. At this point, the mainstream media had only just reported on the vote and provided little additional context (and none had explained the U.S. abstention). He fired off a few quick responses, including:

“@kmcurry support ceasefire but wanted more progress Mubarak initiative before a vote. That said, wanted to get to ceasefire.” – link

While he didn’t get into details, expectations were low (unlike the consulate event) and because this was so impromptu and immediate, a handful of sentences were all that was needed. More detailed explanation could come later. His quick replies really gave a real sense of openness, engagement and immediacy. Naturally, scale helped a lot here, this was informal and he probably only received a dozen questions (if that), most on the decision to abstain.

Social media as a multiplier

As I’ve said before, social media serves best as a multiplier in public diplomacy. Ideally, the foundation of any engagement should be face-to-face discussions (or other more “high fidelity” engagement, preferably in person). Twitter and other social media tools are useful as a support to this on-the-ground engagement, creating what some have called “ambient intimacy” between site visits.

For all the talk of coordinated outreach, the Israeli Consulate didn’t initially seem to tie their Twitter use to their other outreach efforts. Nonetheless, while the actual press conference failed, choosing to hold it was a publicity coup. Most of the criticism thus far has been focused on the use of the tool, not on the message being delivered, and anything that brings people back to the Israeli content channels, is a net positive for them. They (and everyone else) will learn from this, and the next try will be better, though less notable.

Indeed, it is obvious they recognized the shortcomings. If you look at their archive of the press conference, their replies are not the original stilted 140 character responses but paragraph long explanations of Israel’s side of the conflict.