I just finished reading Steven Levy’s piece in this month’s Wired, Booting Up Baghdad: Tech Execs Take a Tour in Iraq, where at the invitation of the State Department’s “diplo-nerd”, Jared Cohen, several Silicon Valley executives from companies like Google, Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, and AT&T met with Iraqis to talk about using technology to spread democracy (the same trip was covered in Business Week in June).
Not too long after the trip to Iraq, it was Cohen who asked Twitter to hold off on a system upgrade during the Iranian elections as it appeared that, according to P.J. Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs, “Twitter is playing an important role at a crucial time in Iran.” and “We are proponents of freedom of expression. Information should be used as a way to promote freedom of expression.”
Open Source Software Soft Power
I appreciate Cohen’s ideas but I don’t think his approach to U.S. diplomacy through technology is overly unique. However, it got me thinking about how we can internationalize the OpenGov momentum building in the U.S. After all, we live in an increasingly networked society, there is a history of exporting U.S. technology for democracy and, in the US, there has been a growing movement toward participatory democracy through open data like Data.gov and Open Source for America, whose mission is to educate and encourage the U.S. Federal government about the advantages of using free and open source software.
We have recently witnessed a shift in the diplomatic lexicon from “soft power” to “smart power”; whatever you decide to call it, we are talking about “the ability to obtain what you want through co-option and attraction” (wikipedia). So, if “information should be used as a way to promote freedom of expression”, as Crowley described above, is it fair to associate information technology with this goal? Naturally, I’m inclined to say “yes”.
But, exactly how can open source software play a role in “smart power”?
Maybe more importantly…
Does open source software provide an existing model upon which to base the concepts of an “open source diplomacy”?
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