The Foreign Service Journal, April 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2017 19 C reated in 2005 as an expat blog, www.expat.com has grown in to a community of more than 1.8 million members worldwide. Present in more than 197 countries and 500 cities, the website provides a forum for expats to talk about their unique lives, find employment in their new country and deal with the logis- tics of moving around (e.g., health insurance, moving companies and finding housing options). Signing up is free, and members can also be “Experts”—a group of vol- unteers who liven up the forums and make themselves available to answer questions about their host country. Those questions could be anything from“Where can I find kosher marsh- mallows in Vietnam?” to “How did you ship your pet cat to Costa Rica?”The experts have been there, done that, got the t-shirt and are willing to share their experiences. American expats make up the top 10 largest communities of expats on the site, closely followed by Austra- lians and Egyptians. Expat.com also hosts offline events in a number of countries, where expats can meet in person and engage with each other and the local community. The search function allows the user to find those in or going to his or her country of interest, and also to narrow the search by nationality, interests and age. Each country page also has links to bloggers from the area and a dedicated page of the larger forum for country-specific questions and tips. —Gemma Dvorak, Associate Editor SITE OF THE MONTH: www.expat.com four members from a list of candidates compiled by Congress. They will report to the BBG’s Chief Executive Officer (currently John F. Lansing), who will be answerable to the White House alone, and will have free rein to hire and fire network heads and set guidelines for programming. The CEO will also have statutory authority to meld all U.S.-government international media outlets except VOA into a single, consolidated, private, non- profit corporation. The new entity’s mission would be to: (1) counter state-sponsored propaganda; (2) provide uncensored local and regional news and analysis; (3) help countries help themselves in terms of indigenous news capabilities; and (4) promote unre- stricted access to uncensored information sources, especially the internet. Some experts have sounded the alarm about the potential dangers of this devel- opment. Writing on ForeignPolicy.com on Dec. 15, Jeffrey Gedmin, who was president and CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from 2007 to 2011, concedes that RFE/RL and other outlets have been con- sistently hamstrung by the BBG’s dysfunc- tion and poor governance. But, Gedmin points out: “The BBG