State Department Sounding Board

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US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked for the creation of an online forum for State Department employees to submit ideas directly to the Secretary. The Sounding Board was an intranet blog developed and launched [1] in February 2009 by staff from the State Department's Office of eDiplomacy.

Hillary Clinton 67th United States Secretary of State

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is an American politician, diplomat, lawyer, writer and public speaker. She was First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001, a United States senator from New York from 2001 to 2009, and the 67th United States secretary of state from 2009 until 2013. Clinton became the first woman to be nominated for president of the United States by a major political party when she won the Democratic Party nomination in 2016.

Internet forum online discussion site

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes publicly visible.

An intranet is a computer network for sharing corporate information, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services only within an organization, and to the exclusion of access by outsiders to the organization. The term is used in contrast to public networks, such as the Internet, but uses most of the same technology based on the Internet Protocol Suite.

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The platform metrics soon generated 27,000 page views a month and serves as a global water cooler for a workforce spread around the planet. [2] It has served as a platform for brain-storming ideas and crowd sourcing non-policy solutions. [3]

Employee response to the online forum varied from enthusiasm to concern for maintaining confidentiality and decorum. Some contributors to the Sounding Board expressed worry that public airing of internal discussion might embarrass the Department of State; comments that were subsequently published in Washington Post reporter Al Kamen's column "In The Loop". [4]

The Sounding Board was an internal platform (discussion forum) for State Department employees to exchange ideas, while DipNote [5] is the Secretary of State's blog on the internet. The use of social media was seen as essential for 21st century diplomacy. The Department of State was "integrating social media into the job descriptions of all the foreign service officers", says New Media Director Katie Dowd. [6]

Social media are interactive computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks. The variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available introduces challenges of definition; however, there are some common features:

  1. Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.
  2. User-generated content, such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions, is the lifeblood of social media.
  3. Users create service-specific profiles and identities for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.
  4. Social media facilitate the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.

The Sounding Board was ended on August 31, 2017.

Other media references

Critiques

See also

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References

  1. "Major Programs of IRM's Office of eDiplomacy".
  2. Marks, Oliver. "eDiplomacy: The US State Department's Global Collaborative Backbone - ZDNet".
  3. "Taking Collaborative Risk at The State Department".
  4. "Unpaid lawmakers? Don't tell the Founders' ghosts".
  5. Clinton presides over State Department 2.0, archived from the original on 2013-06-15, retrieved 2016-10-27
  6. "U.S. Department of State's New Media Director: We're 'Still Behind in New Media'".