Diplopedia

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Diplopedia Logo Diplopedia Logo.png
Diplopedia Logo

Diplopedia, [1] billed as the Encyclopedia of the United States Department of State, is a wiki running on a State internal Intranet, called "OpenNet". It houses a unique collection of information pertaining to diplomacy, international relations, and Department of State tradecraft.

Contents

The wiki may be used by U.S. foreign affairs agencies domestic and abroad with State intranet access. It is also available to the United States intelligence community and other national-security related organizations using the Intelink-U network as a mirrored, read-only archive. Both sites are rated by the government as sensitive but unclassified. The wiki on either network is not open to the public.

Diplopedia is a project of the Office of eDiplomacy (eDip), located in the Bureau of Information Resource Management within the Department of State. Diplopedia uses MediaWiki, the same software used by the Wikipedia free-content encyclopedia project. [2]

Creation and usage

The project was launched in September 2006 [3] after a presentation by State at Wikimania 2006. [2]

The program began as part of a larger effort created by former Secretary Condoleezza Rice within the concept of Transformational Diplomacy. Under that plan, personnel utilized Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, communities, and virtual work environments to provide diplomacy to areas that have been underrepresented. [4] The program continued under Secretary Hillary Clinton's vision of diplomatic Smart Power, which also relied heavily on new media to include the web, blogs, and wikis, in concert with commercial online media distribution including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. [5]

At Wikimania 2008, eDiplomacy revealed the state of the wiki as of July 2008. In a presentation entitled "Diplopedia: Wiki Culture in the U.S. Department of State", the overall Diplopedia project hosted more than 4,400 substantive articles, is edited by 1,000 registered users, and has had 650,000 page views. [6]

In January 2009, Diplopedia was among 27 online technologies named as "The Best Government Tech of the Bush Years" by Wired. [7]

By February 2010, the wiki had grown to 10,000 articles by over 2,000 contributors. [8]

As reported at Wikimania 2012, Diplopedia surpassed 5,000 editors and 16,300 articles. [9]

Content

Diplopedia main page Diplopedia main page.jpg
Diplopedia main page

Examples of Diplopedia content include a comprehensive collection of information for desk officers, the Foreign Service Officers who act as the in-house experts and go-to officials on a particular country.

Desk officers rotate out of their positions every two years and often have little lead time to learn the scope of their new job. Diplopedia provides a desk officer manual, advising them on everything from what to make of Department jargon, how to move a paper for decision, or how to navigate a new Ambassador through the complexities of Senate confirmation and assignment to his or her mission.

Forty briefing portals help Department employees find and contribute information on specific programs, economic issues, and international politics. Recent additions are part of a working space for foreign policy experts to share and collate information that underpins the Department's efforts to address a major global issue which encompasses economic, political, human rights and population concerns. [8]

Community practices

The wiki provides so much flexibility that several offices throughout the community are using it to maintain and transfer knowledge on daily operations and events. Anyone with access to read it has permission to create and edit articles after registering and acquiring an account with Diplopedia (there are no anonymous edits allowed). Since Diplopedia is intended to be a platform for expressing the various points of view of the Department, Diplopedia does not enforce a pure neutral point of view policy. Instead, viewpoints are attributed to the offices and individuals participating, with the hope that a consensus view will emerge. Positions or views in an article that do not fairly represent the consensus of the relevant community of interest are to be clearly marked with the author, office, or agency whose views they represent. [10]

Diplopedia has a unique categorization of abbreviations and acronyms (pervasive in government). Each is placed in Category:Abbreviation and most point to articles on the topic the abbreviation represents. Information is also grouped by categories familiar to diplomats and lay people alike such as Missions Abroad, Offices, Information Technology, and Security. [10] Diplopedia also contains non-encyclopedic content including notes and items of internal, administrative interest.

Diplopedia uses two categorizations for frequent users: mythical creatures from Wikipedia and colored belts as used on Intellipedia.

Intellipedia

Congressional testimony from Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, [11] notes the difference between vertical and horizontal information sharing and suggests that both could be successful e-government endeavors. Intellipedia is an excellent example of sharing information horizontally across agencies, and Diplopedia has found similar success in sharing information within the Department of State bureaucracy. Statements on both wikis encourage cross posting of relevant information as appropriate.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wiki</span> Type of website that visitors can edit

A wiki is a form of online hypertext publication that is collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.

In international relations, public diplomacy broadly speaking, is any of the various government-sponsored efforts aimed at communicating directly with foreign publics to establish a dialogue designed to inform and influence with the aim of building support for the state's strategic objectives. These also include propaganda. As the international order has changed over the twentieth century, so has the practice of public diplomacy. Its practitioners use a variety of instruments and methods ranging from personal contact and media interviews to the Internet and educational exchanges.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SIPRNet</span> Computer network used by the United States Government

The Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) is "a system of interconnected computer networks used by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of State to transmit classified information by packet switching over the 'completely secure' environment". It also provides services such as hypertext document access and electronic mail. As such, SIPRNet is the DoD's classified version of the civilian Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intelink</span>

Intelink is a group of secure intranets used by the United States Intelligence Community. The first Intelink network was established in 1994 to take advantage of Internet technologies and services to promote intelligence dissemination and business workflow. Since then it has become an essential capability for the US intelligence community and its partners to share information, collaborate across agencies, and conduct business. Intelink refers to the web environment on protected top secret, secret, and unclassified networks. One of the key features of Intelink is Intellipedia, an online system for collaborative data sharing based on MediaWiki. Intelink uses WordPress as the basis of its blogging service.

The Office of eDiplomacy is an applied technology think tank for the United States Department of State. The Office of eDiplomacy is staffed by Foreign and Civil Service Officers in a wide range of specializations. There are four branches: the Diplomatic Innovation Division (DID), the Knowledge Leadership Division (KLD), the Customer Liaison Division (CLD), and the Business Requirements Unit (BRU).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intellipedia</span> US Intelligence Community encyclopedia

Intellipedia is an online system for collaborative data sharing used by the United States Intelligence Community (IC). It was established as a pilot project in late 2005 and formally announced in April 2006. Intellipedia consists of three wikis running on the separate JWICS (Intellipedia-TS), SIPRNet (Intellipedia-S), and DNI-U (Intellipedia-U) networks. The levels of classification allowed for information on the three wikis are Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information, Secret (S), and Sensitive But Unclassified information, respectively. Each of the wikis is used by individuals with appropriate clearances from the 18 agencies of the US intelligence community and other national-security related organizations, including Combatant Commands and other federal departments. The wikis are not open to the public.

The Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System is the United States Department of Defense's secure intranet system that houses top secret and sensitive compartmented information. JWICS superseded the earlier DSNET2 and DSNET3, the Top Secret and SCI levels of the Defense Data Network based on ARPANET technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Transformational Diplomacy</span> Diplomacy initiative by Condoleezza Rice

Transformational Diplomacy is a diplomacy initiative championed by former United States secretary of state Condoleezza Rice for reinvigorating American Foreign Policy and the United States Foreign Service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of wikis</span> History of wiki collaborative platforms

The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".

Bureaupedia is a wiki used internally at the FBI with the intention of capturing the knowledge of senior agents and reduce knowledge loss due to retirement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimania</span> Official annual conference organized by volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, organized by volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, other wikis, open-source software, free knowledge and free content, and social and technical aspects related to these topics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DoDTechipedia</span> Wiki of the United States Department of Defense

DoDTechipedia is a wiki developed by the United States Department of Defense (DoD), to facilitate increased communication and collaboration among DoD scientists, engineers, program managers, acquisition professionals and operational warfighters. DoDTechipedia is a living knowledge base that reduces duplication of effort, encourages collaboration among program areas and connects capability providers with technology developers. DoDTechipedia runs on Confluence wiki engine, unlike a number of MediaWiki-based government wikis like Diplopedia and Bureaupedia.

DipNote is the official blog of the United States Department of State. It was started on September 25, 2007, with a first post by the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Sean McCormack. DipNote was revised in 2009, with the Departments' 21st Century Statecraft initiative. DipNote works in conjunction with other public diplomacy programs, as part of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's smart power initiatives.

Communities @ State is one of the U.S. government's internal blogs to promote inter-agency dialog.

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 in February 2009 by staff from the State Department's Office of eDiplomacy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Enterprise social networking</span>

Enterprise social networking focuses on the use of online social networks or social relations among people who share business interests and/or activities. Enterprise social networking is often a facility of enterprise social software, which is essentially social software used in "enterprise" (business/commercial) contexts. It encompasses modifications to corporate intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication, collaboration and other aspects of their intranets. Enterprise social networking is also generally thought to include the use of a standard external social networking service to generate visibility for an enterprise.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Boly</span> American diplomat

Richard Boly is a former career U.S. diplomat and former Director of the Office of eDiplomacy, an applied technology think tank for the U.S. Department of State. Previously, he was a National Security Affairs Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he launched the Global Entrepreneurship Program.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">United States cyber-diplomacy</span>

Cyber-diplomacy is the evolution of public diplomacy to include and use the new platforms of communication in the 21st century. As explained by Jan Melissen in The New Public Diplomacy: Soft Power in International Relations, cyber-diplomacy “links the impact of innovations in communication and information technology to diplomacy.” Cyber-diplomacy is also known as or is part of public diplomacy 2.0, Digital diplomacy, EDiplomacy, and virtual diplomacy. Cyber-diplomacy has as its underpinnings that, “it recognizes that new communication technologies offer new opportunities to interact with a wider public by adopting a network approach and making the most of an increasingly multicentric global, interdependent system.”

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katherine Maher</span> American media executive

Katherine Roberts Maher is an American businesswoman. She is the incoming chief executive and president of NPR. She will begin her tenure in March 2024, succeeding John Lansing. Before accepting the position at NPR, she served as chief executive officer of Web Summit and chair of the board of directors at the Signal Foundation. She will continue as Web Summit's CEO until March, then will remain with the group as their non-executive chairperson. She is a former chief executive officer and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

GCTools is a suite of enterprise digital collaboration applications maintained by the Canadian Government. It consists of:

References

  1. Family Liaison Office. "A Guide to the Foreign Service" (PDF). Retrieved April 21, 2015.
  2. 1 2 Bronk, Robert 'Chris' (August 1, 2006). "Diplopedia: Application of the Wiki Model for Collaborative Drafting in Foreign Affairs". Proceedings of Wikimania 2006 - The Second International Wikimedia Conference (Abstract). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Wikimedia Foundation.
  3. "Major Programs of the Office of eDiplomacy". U.S. Department of State. Archived from the original on January 11, 2008. Retrieved February 2, 2008.
  4. Bronk, Chris; Smith, Tiffany (2010). "Diplopedia Imagined: Building State's Diplomacy Wiki" (PDF). Proceedings of the 2010 International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems (draft). Archived from the original (PDF) on May 20, 2010.
  5. Lee, Matthew. "Hillary Clinton, e-diplomat, embraces new media". AP on realtas.net. Archived from the original on May 26, 2009. Retrieved June 21, 2009.
  6. Johnson, Eric (July 19, 2008). Diplopedia: Wiki Culture in the U.S. Department of State. Wikimania 2008 (Video). Alexandria, Egypt.
  7. Thompson, Nicholas (January 27, 2009). "The Best Government Tech of the Bush Years". Wired. Retrieved February 5, 2009.
  8. 1 2 Licciardi, Tiffany Smith; Green, Linda G. "Diplopedia Celebrates 10,000 Articles". DipNote (U.S. Dept of State Official Blog). Retrieved February 5, 2010.
  9. Bronk, Chris; Lydens, Anne. "Tech@State Hosts Wiki.Gov Conference". DipNote (U.S. Dept of State Official Blog). Retrieved July 20, 2012.
  10. 1 2 Johnson, Eric M. (November 14, 2007). Diplopedia: Knowledge sharing through an enterprise wiki at the U.S. Department of State (PDF). EPA Environmental Information Symposium. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 26, 2012.
  11. Wales Senate Testimony regarding "E-Government 2.0: Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access" Archived September 27, 2011, at the Wayback Machine Page 3,5