The Foreign Service Journal, September 2008

M any of us who have been involved in the State Department’s information outreach efforts since the very first days that the Internet became avail- able as a tool for U.S. missions over- seas are concerned that the depart- ment is falling steadily behind the technology curve and that our ability to reach foreign audiences is actually shrinking. Foreign Service old-timers will recall that the Internet started becoming available about 1993 — not so long ago in the way that most of us measure time, but an eon in electron- ic terms. The U.S. Information Agency and State Department adopted different strategies to deal with the budget pressures of the 1990s, exacerbated by Secretary of State James Baker’s decision to open 14 new embassies in the former Soviet Union without seeking any additional funding for them. USIA invested in technology and put an effective stop to hiring, while State continued to hire new FSOs but held off on adopting new technology, sticking with clunky Wang personal computers well past their usefulness. The 1990s were the go-go days for information outreach for USIA. Because the Internet was new, our technical staff at posts worldwide was relatively free to experiment with developing tools and creating Web sites that made the best use of the lat- est technology. Believe it or not, for a while our Web pages were almost cutting-edge, and most webmasters found their jobs exciting and reward- ing. At the same time, we were trans- forming libraries into Information Resource Centers. While many FSOs believe that closing libraries wholesale was not the best thing to do, it was hard to argue with the suc- cess our IRCs had in providing what at the time was unparalleled access to articles and documents for important contacts in the press, academia, for- eign governments and elsewhere. Consolidation and OpenNet: A Temporary Improvement USIA, which still tended to oper- ate in more open and public facili- ties, had relatively free Internet access, allowing our FSOs to do a broad range of information outreach relatively unimpeded. Meanwhile, State relied on an arrangement that required anybody wishing to use the Internet to have a completely sepa- rate computer in the office or even on a separate floor. USIA was folded into State at the end of 1999, ushering in a variety of changes to the way the U.S. conduct- ed information outreach overseas. A little over a year later, when Colin Powell became Secretary of State, an impressive effort was made to bring State’s moribund technology up to date. OpenNet delivered on its pledge to bring the Internet to every desktop, thereby reassuring FSOs from USIA that State technology would eventually be up to the job, and persuading State employees that they had finally bridged the huge technology gap. Unfortunately, technological change moves at such a quick pace nowadays that there is no such thing as “catch- ing up,” at least not if you assume that having caught up means you can rest on your laurels. The sense that we had closed the technology gap al- lowed the first of several mistakes in our information outreach to creep in: the dismantling of USIA’s indepen- dent Internet access, known as PDNet. For a brief time, OpenNet ap- peared able to accommodate our out- reach needs, but that didn’t last long. Imperceptibly, the focus shifted from using the latest technology to create eye-catching Web pages to bringing that technology under the control of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and the Information Resources Man- agement Bureau. This shift intro- duced bureaucratic hurdles that have significantly delayed the adoption of new technology. State’s Wrong Turn on the Information Highway B Y S COTT R AULAND S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 13 S PEAKING O UT To reach the audiences of the 21st century, we first need to take a few steps backward to undo the mistakes of the 1990s. u