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”?

As expected, I’m not the first to consider applying the open source technology model to diplomacy. In 2002, the Aspen Institute’s round table on How the Internet is changing International Politics and Diplomacy (PDF) suggested “Netpolitik” as a more encompassing framework for understanding the trends, forces, and characteristics of our emerging network society. Another example can be found in Ali Fisher’s Music for the Jilted Generation: Open-Source Public Diplomacy, where he references Rothkopf’s 1998 ‘information revolution’ as

The realpolitik of the new era is cyberpolitik, in which the actors are no longer just states, and raw power can be countered or fortified by information power. The mighty will continue to prevail, but the sources, instruments and measures of that might are dramatically changed.

Fisher describes the battle between hierarchical bureaucracies and community networks within public diplomacy as akin to Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar and suggests:

It is about achieving your goals through helping others achieve theirs. Effectively, it is about realizing that an organization is part of a wider community…Communication ‘is not all about warfare, about winning “hearts and minds” for the sake of achieving military victory. It is, as Karl Deutsch long ago emphasized, the method of community’. It is in this area of community where the potential for creativity exists in the adoption of new methods of working in public diplomacy; where the opportunity to achieve ‘creative diplomacy’ lies…

The proliferation of transnational open source platforms, where Java or PHP is the common language, lower the barriers for activists to raise awareness to their cause, expands access to those with a shared interest, and enable opportunities where none exist locally. Furthermore, these technologies allow globally dispersed diaspora to influence the internal politics and external policy of their homelands through innovative application of the software. I’m sure the same could be said for closed source software, but it makes sense to me that I address the lowest barrier to entry, and that is open source.

A recently popular example of cyber activism is of course Ushahidi, which arose during the civil unrest in Kenya in early 2008. Today, the software is supported by developers in Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Malawi, Ghana, Netherlands and the US. While Ushahidi is a somewhat specialized application (mobile-to-web for “crowdsourcing crisis information”), there are other large-scale open source software projects like Drupal, Joomla!, or WordPress with a global development core whose abilities could help open international governments to improve transparency, international collaboration, and opportunity, as well as providing for activism or open source diplomacy.

A Quick Glance @ Drupal Demographics

I decided to explore the global reach of one of the larger open source platforms, Drupal. Before thinking about how open source software networks like Drupal can help open the “digital public square”, I first wanted to determine the extent its reach. What I initially determined was that this exercise was going to be interesting but that I would not accomplish it in one post, so I will continue this theme in future updates. In case you were wondering, Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) that dates back to 2001 and has a wide community supporting the platform with whom you can interact in the Drupal Groups that:

…serves the Drupal community by providing a place for groups to organize, plan and work on projects. Real world local user groups in particular are encouraged to setup their online presence here.

According to the Drupal Groups list, there are around 650 active groups and over 71,500 group subscriptions. Of the active groups, I selected those that are identified by geographic location – this accounted for 280 active groups and almost 19,000 members in over 80 countries.

I believe it’s fair to say that Drupal has an extensive following around the globe. For instance, there are developer groups throughout Europe, the Middle East, South America, and Africa, including Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Morrocco, South Africa. The largest groups appear to be the U.S., Canada, and Germany.

Have I proven anything?

Well, probably not yet; but, my initial observation is that Drupal does provide a valuable global development core that can be used to help open international governments for the sake of transparency or for activists or, possibly, open source diplomacy. Over the next few posts, I will attempt to dig a little deeper into the the concept of “open source diplomacy” and determine what role open source software can provide as a model for this concept. Additionally, I will attempt to look at ways a network, like Drupal Groups, can be leveraged during times of crisis, or assisted through training or internationalization of the platform.