Tech@State - What's@Stake

Last time I touched on State's "21st Century Diplomacy" push, so I thought I'd elaborate. One of the core concepts is that no single organization, including the Department of State, has all the answers to the problems of international development and diplomacy. As such State has been making a real effort to be "conveners," using their name, reputation, access to power, and (yes) money to pull people together. This was partly born out of the Haiti disaster response experience; many of the successes of the relief efforts can be credited to the fact that State had the connections to pull together a disparate group of folks from the military, major NGOs, and a disparate group of Internet-connected activists. This was a proving ground for concepts like Ushahidi and CrisisCamp.As an aside, such networks, rather than classical hierarchical companies, are a fascinating innovation in organization only really possible via the Internet. As transaction costs approach zero and physical proximity becomes less and less important, the whole concept of the corporation may end up becoming obsolete, replaced by ad-hoc networks that can form to tackle specific problems and then disperse. State's attempting to regularize these relationships and pull in the tech-y types from across the spectrum with their Tech@State initiative. While not every person in every company should be involved in tech, in most there's someone relevant who can then be a gateway to the rest of their organization. Building those bridges now enables groups to work together effectively with established relationships when the crisis hits. If you're reading this, you're probably the kind of person they want involved. State has created an online community to support it - go sign up at http://tech.state.gov. Their next big event will be Civil Society 2.0 on Nov. 4th.