Have you heard about the US State Department announcing their take on Facebook (or LinkedIn!). Statebook is their internal version (or take of) Facebook. The department’s Office of eDiplomacy plan is to utilize social medial tools on a secure network so that employees and doplomatic officials around the world will be able to converse and collaborate – with hopes of simplifying the identifications of experts in specific fields.
What makes Statebook different is the security parameters (firewall protection) which will be in place for the site. Currently, diplomatic employees have been utilizing Diplopedia (internal wiki) since 2006. It sounds like Statebook is probably more like LinkedIn, as the idea is that the information you are sharing you want to share with colleagues.
I understand that the Office of eDiplomancy was created 7 years ago to move US government from the old ways (keeping secrets) to the new ways of sharing information and finding a way to aggregate it so that threats may be identified. Seems to be an excellent start!!
Is this program/software opensource? Can other agencies access the program for their own internal use? I see great applications for this in agencies like the VA, as well.
Lori –
I don’t know much more about it other than they are going to be testing the site with a beta group of 300-400 users and the brief article read today references eDiplomacy’s director Richard Boly as the source of the information.
Sounds like good innovative use of the available technologies. Cool!