A staffing update: Katie Stanton, whose hiring by the White House we covered earlier this year, will be departing the White House new media team headed by Macon Phillips to join the State Department. Stanton, who had been serving as the White House Director of Citizen Participation, will be aiding in the execution of the State Department's burgeoning and ambitious "21st century statecraft" initiative that aims to use technology to advance the department's aims around the globe. Secretary Clinton's Senior Advisor on innovation, Alec Ross, whose team in the Secretary's office Stanton will be joining, had this to say: "Katie has an uncommon blend of foreign policy and technology expertise that will be put to work on projects around the globe from Rwanda to Mexico. I couldn’t be more excited to have her on the team."

Points off to David Rothkoph trotting out the "pantsuits" trope in the very lede of his Washington Post piece yesterday on Hillary Clinton. But Rothkoph should be given more credit for attempting to slot Clinton's embrace of technology into the bigger picture of what the Secretary of State is attempting to do in Foggy Bottom. It's not an easy trick to pull off. (I should mention that my own attempt is here.) As every "e-campaign" manager knows, it's tempting to put mobile, the Internet, and other digital wizardry into its own box and present it with a wink and a bow. It's true on campaigns, even post-Obama '08. And it's proving to be true in bureaucracies, even in the Obama Administration.

Rothkoph offers a brief sketch of PdF '09 keynote Alec Ross's role at State:

Clinton recruited Alec Ross, one of the leaders of Obama's technology policy team, to the seventh floor of the State Department as her senior adviser for innovation. His mission is to harness new information tools to advance U.S. interests -- a task made easier as the Internet and mobile networks have played starring roles in recent incidents, from Iran to the Uighur uprising in western China to Moldova. Whether through a telecommunications program in Congo to protect women from violence or text messaging to raise money for Pakistani refugees in the Swat Valley, technology has been deployed to reach new audiences.

When it comes to government agencies adapting to the Networked Age, the State Department is no slouch. It's had an Office of eDiplomacy since 2003; its staffers make heavy use of an internal unclassified online encyclopedia called Diplopedia; it's been blogging since September 2007 at Dipnote; and now State even has a Twitter feed. ExchangesConnect, a cultural exchange social networking site (built on Ning.com) that focuses on foreign exchange students, recently topped its 10,000th member.

Under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the State Department has also been in the forefront of Obama administration moves to experiment with and adopt new ways to interact with the public, including using YouTube and text-messaging as ways to pose questions directly. The overall push is showing results, reports the AP: "Daily views of the Dipnote have doubled from 10,000 a year ago to 20,000 today, with 700 subscribers to its RSS feed, twice as many as in March 2008. The number of followers of the department on Twitter has tripled since Jan. 20, when Obama took office, while the department's Facebook friends have increased by 2 1/2 times in the same period." (Lots more details on State's digital initiatives here.)

But this is just the beginning of a larger conceptual shift, says Alec Ross, who recently was named senior adviser to the Secretary of State for innovation. During the campaign, Ross was a key person in developing Obama's far-reaching technology and open government platform, and he is looking forward to playing a similar role at State. The shift, he says, is away from a sole focus on government-to-government interaction and towards government-to-people, people-to-government, and maybe even people-to-people. Government can be much more creative in how they enable people to engage directly with each other, he argues, and there's no doubt that networked people can become important players on the international stage as well.