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Clinton Announces Second Tech-Inspired Youth Summit

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, March 31 2009

Speaking to an audience at Monterrey, Mexico's TecMilenio University, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced plans for a second Alliance of Youth Movements summit, to be held in Mexico City in September. The first AYM, held at Columbia Law School this winter, was a Bush-era project that quickly came together out of some shared thinking between Facebook, the U.S. State Department, HowCast, and a few other tech companies. There's sort of two different strains of thinking behind it. The first (and more public) thread is that social-networking tools can help people all over the world resist oppressive governments. At the New York City event this winter, the stars of the day were folks like Oscar Morales, who used Facebook to organize against the FARC guerilla group in Colombia, and the creators of No Mas Chavez, a Facebook group against the Venezuelan leader. The second is more subtext: that the United States can win over hearts and minds online to the American way of thinking. On his way out of Foggy Bottom, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs James Glassman had wondered aloud how supportive of those "public diplomacy 2.0" efforts the new presidential administration and new Secretary of State would be. Clinton's remarks are after the jump.

...I am strengthened by my experience in seeing the results of what education can bring, not just to individuals and their families, but to communities, societies, and countries. We also have the opportunity to amplify the impact of nongovernmental organizations and civil society because of new technologies. The State Department is working with several companies, including Google and YouTube, Howcast, and AT&T to develop innovative ways to use networking technologies so we can put more power in the hands of citizens, giving people online tools to track corruption or report on the activity of cartel members without risking their safety.

Young people around the world are poised to lead this kind of innovative citizen empowerment, which is why the United States is supporting a summit here in Mexico of Alliance of Youth Movements, to connect up young people working to end to end violence throughout Latin America, whether it's domestic violence or dating violence or lawlessness in the streets of your community, we must all take a stand against violence. And this is a new tool that will help.

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