by dave fauth on December 24, 2008
Colleen Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy at the State Department, is twittering as one method of sharing the US’s policies, values and cultures. On her recent trip to Iceland, Romania, Moldova, Croatia, and Armenia, she twittered some of her professional diplomatic interactions along with some personal adventures (Blue Lagoon in Iceland).
This new diplomatic outreach hasn’t been without controversy. It was first noted in the Washington Post and then discussed online in an article called How Not to Win Hearts and Minds. Today, Dec 24, Colleen Graffey wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post outlining the benefits and purposes of her twittering.
“One clear lesson that emerged from the Cold War was that winning hearts and minds required communicating in a way that “connected” with people on their terms, whether through film or jazz or jeans. To keep our public diplomacy relevant today, we have to reach out and connect with people on their terms, whether we use blogs or texts — or tweets. “
Thanks to the State Department for using new methods and ideas for listening and participating in the world’s conversations.
by dave fauth on December 24, 2008
In a previous post, I talked about Gist releasing new features. As a beta user, one of the key features that I was eagerly awaiting was the MS Outlook support. Even though I regularly use GMail, most of my corporate email and contacts are in Outlook.
Lo and behold, last night in my inbox is an email from T. A. McCann announcing a holiday upgrade for GIST to include:
- MS Outlook support with GIST Desktop
- Relationship Widget
- Twitter integration
- Dow Jones company information
- Enhanced search
- And a whole lot more
Hats off to the Gist team for these enhancements. If you are interested in giving Gist a try, leave a comment and we will assist you in getting an account.
by dave fauth on December 19, 2008
The Project on National Security Reform has released its recommendations in a detailed report.
The Project on National Security Reform has relayed its recommendations to the President, President-elect, and Congress. Pending approval of reforms, the Project is ready to support government leadership in implementing the recommendations through preparation of draft presidential directives, changes to Senate and House rules, and a new National Security Act to replace many provisions of the 1947 legislation.
Of particular interest to me was the section on impediments to information sharing. Among those listed were:
- Poor interoperability on the classified side
- Overclassification
- The proliferation of the “sensitive but unclassified” designation
- Confusing technical connections with collaboration
- Information systems are missing common data abstraction, protocols, and compatible business logic
- Inability of systems to understand business limitations and context of data
These aren’t surprising. If you look at the 2008 Annual CIO Challenges Survey, challenges 2 through 4 are related:
- Balancing information sharing and security/privacy requirements
- Obtaining adequate funding for IT programs and projects
- Simplifying business processes to maximize the benefit of technology
Adequate funding with policy enforcements should help address these challenges.
You can find some on-line analysis/critique/discussion here. Other discussion can be found on twitter. Thanks to John Bordeaux for his work on the PNSR and for Chris Dorobek for his heads up on the CIO report.