By way of an update on yesterday's post about level of thoughtful critique surrounding the U.S. State Department's* digital diplomacy efforts, Senior Advisor for Innovation Alec Ross has taken to State's DipNote blog to respond to a comment left on an earlier post on said blog that questioned both the utility of State's planned narco-violence tip line in Mexico's Ciudad Juarez and Ross' willingness to engage his audience in discussions of the project. Here's Ross:

The TipLine (which will launch in the months ahead), is one small part of a much larger effort by the Mexican and U.S. governments to restore security to the border region. The United States has invested $1.4 billion so far in the Merida Initiative, which focuses on the shared challenge of narco-fueled violence in the region. The TipLine is a pilot, but if we can make a difference in the epicenter of the violence along our shared border, then there may be an opportunity to scale it more broadly. 

Some of these efforts seek to address root causes, and some seek to address immediate needs. One of the immediate needs is to restore public confidence in the police force, and ensure accountability and transparency in law enforcement wherever possible. To this end, we are working with Mexico to establish anonymous crime reporting in Ciudad Juarez. Part of a plan to overhaul the public safety communications system in the city, the idea for the TipLine has two primary components. The first is to provide anonymity to callers so that they can be assured of their safety, and the second is to create transparency in how the police have responded to the tips by establishing a public website that provides information about the investigations in response to tips.

...

This is no time to sit back and simply watch an ever-rising homicide rate. This is the time to work closely together with our Mexican partners to take action. People are dying, and this is one small way in which we can help.

One way to read Ross' follow-up post is as a scaling-back of expectations around the pilot project. As Ross mentions, the United States has sunk a bucket of money into the "Merida Initiative" aimed at combatting drug troubles in and around Mexico and Central America -- about a billion and a half dollars for three years of work. The money needs to be spent somewhere. Equipping Mexicans with better tools for voluntarily tracking and revealing threats against them is one logical place to spend it. It's part of a much bigger thing, but what's happened in the selling of the Clinton State Department's "21st Century Statecraft" is that these tech projects get plucked out of their context. Doing that gives these examples a little added glamour and pop. But it also opens up the door to critiques that what we're looking at is techno-utopian experimentation ripped from the realities of both foreign policy and the very messy real world.

Reintegrating that work into the full of what State does and is doing is probably a more sustainable approach for the long haul. And there's something to be said for the fact that not only did Ross use the State Department blog (and that the State Department actually has a blog) but that someone at State actually thought to go back to the first post and its critical comment and let that commenter know that Ross had responded to his probing comments. It is, indeed, exactly the sort of collaboration and open sharing of ideas that might be behind, say, an approach to engaging with the world driven by an appreciation for the heightened connectedness of humanity these days.