The more cynical amongst us might have looked at Hillary Clinton's rush to embrace "21st Century Statecraft" when she landed in the Secretary of State seat as a chance to make up for all that wasn't done online and with technology during her '08 presidential bid. It wouldn't be a first time that a politician took the "just add Internet" approach to reviving his or her political fortunes. But it seems like every other initiative to come out of the Secretary's office these days has some networked component:

The U.S. Department of State announces the launch of the global “Democracy is…” Twitter Contest. Tweet what you think democracy is using the hash symbol: #democracyis. The goal is to provide a worldwide platform in which people can discuss the meaning of democracy and exchange ideas from diverse perspectives.

The global “Democracy is…” Twitter Contest begins today at 5:30 p.m. EST and ends January 21, 2010 at 11:59 p.m. EST. To join the contest, become a Twitter follower of @demvidchallenge and tweet what you think democracy is in 140 characters or less. The contestant whose tweet with the greatest number of unique re-tweets will receive a Flip Video HD Camcorder. The winner will be announced on the Democracy Video Challenge Facebook fan page ^[1] on January 25, 2010. Only one re-tweet per user will count in the official tally. Additional contests will be announced throughout the year.

Whether or not this social-networks-as-foreign-policy approach will bear fruit is still very much an open question, but it is bleeding into the broader foreign policy discussions, it seems. Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican has taken to Foreign Policy to heap praise on the Clinton State Department's focus on digital tools.

The Alliance of Youth Movements summit, the second of which took place in Mexico City last week, is in some ways a strange beast. (The first AYM took place at Columbia University in New York City last winter.) The annual get together and idea-sharing session is organized by a team of independent leaders, backed by a video startup called HowCast, and in many ways driven by the United States State Department and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - a fluid public-private partnership that reflects the new world order where the lines are increasingly blurred between what's official statecraft and what those of us in the streets and on the Internet are doing to shape the world around us. It's at the Alliance of Youth Movements, for example, where Oscar Morales, who helped lead the No Mas FARC movement in Colombia, sat in a J.W. Marriot conference room next to Natalia Morar, who spearheaded the so-called Twitter Revolution in Moldova, and down the table were Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter, and Alec Ross, Secretary Clinton's advisor on innovation.

I'll have more on what went down at the Alliance of Youth Movements later today and this week. Promise. But in the meantime, it's well worthwhile to dip into the dozens of youth organizations who sent delegates to Mexico City from all over the world, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan to Burma to Venezuela to Northern Ireland to Malaysia. Click on a few and see what they're up to. There's plenty to them from each of them, as they work on the front lines of tech-empowered social engagement. All are doing work that makes rich and valuable fodder as we all think about how we might take an innovative approach to politics and social organizing that this new age calls for...

Hillary Clinton was asked by reporters today about the outreach from within her State Department to Twitter.

According to the report from Agence France-Presse, the Secretary of State replied to the question with generic filler diplo-speak about the importance of free speech and the like. "The United States believes passionately and strongly in the basic principle of free expression," she said. She continued, "And it is the case that one of the means of expression, the use of Twitter is a very important one, not only to the Iranian people but now increasingly to people around the world, and most particularly to young people." Clinton got laughs, noted the AFP, by adding, "I wouldn't know a twitter [sic] from a tweeter."

We talked earlier today about how the framing of this undeniably interesting intersection of the State Department, Twitter, and Iran hasn't exactly been nuanced. That thesis isn't exactly diminished by the pointed headline AFP is running atop Clinton's ambiguous remarks: "Clinton Says Twitter Is Important for Iranian Free Speech."

UPDATE: Here's one from the vault. Clinton, in late May, explaining her vision for 21st century statecraft that "bring[s] together technology and the talents of our citizens to influence events in ways that previous generations never could have imagined."

UPDATE AGAIN: Just a perhaps belated note of caution about the report below. The way Reuters reported the interaction between the State Department and Twitter could refer to anything from a one-to-one phone call between someone in the department and someone in the company to something more formal. Reading this as "Secretary Clinton calls on Twitter..." or, heaven forfend, "President Obama orders Twitter..." is simply nowhere near justified by the reporting in hand.

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There's an fascinating anecdote reported by Reuters and picked by the New York Times' The Lede blog. Officials inside the State Department, it seems got in touch with the San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. to encourage them to hold off on the service outage planned for last night, mid-morning Tehran-time:

The U.S. State Department contacted the social networking service Twitter over the weekend to urge it to delay a planned upgrade that could have cut daytime service to Iranians, a U.S. official said on Tuesday. “We highlighted to them that this was an important form of communication,” said the official of the conversation the department had with Twitter at the time of the disputed Iranian election. He declined further details.

A rather striking sign-of-the-times incident in and of itself. But the aspect that particularly jumps out is how State's outreach to Twitter sits squarely in the context of what the State Department has been attempting to do in the last few months in the field of what's been referred with terms like "digital diplomacy," "21st century statecraft," and "citizen diplomats." The idea is rather simple: the modern peer-to-peer tools of communication brought to us by the Internet and other digital means can alter the flow of world events.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has stressed the concept in recent speeches. She told graduating seniors at Barnard in mid-May, for example, that, "You can organize through Twitter." She also said, "[W]ith these social networking tools that you use every day to tell people you've gone to get a latte...you can unite your friends through Facebook to fight human trafficking," and "These new tools are available for everyone. They are democratizing diplomacy." The stated mission of the Virtual Student Foreign Service started by Clinton is all about increasing the capacity of America's young people to "conduct digital diplomacy that reflects the realities of our networked world." And this concept of digital diplomacy was part of the thinking behind the State Department's new-media delegation sent to Baghdad this spring that included representatives from many of the companies at the core of what's been happening around Iran online, including YouTube and Twitter.

Still, even for those sympathetic to the State Department's idea that these tools are powerful, before this week it was somewhat difficult to see how, exactly, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook were going to change the course of history. That's still not entirely obvious, but Clinton and the State Department are looking a bit prescient these days, and that picture is a little clearer.

Some of us might remember the dawn of the cable news age, when through our TV boxes we were suddenly empowered to see in near real-time the events taking places in lands separated from us by thousands of miles and entire oceans. We could look but not touch, and that distance arguably bled well into the Internet era. Then came Web 2.0, the ethos evolved into do something. We developed an expectation that we could, using our new tools, blur the line between observers and participants. (It's looking possible we'll look back at the last days' events Iran and see the start of Web 3.0 -- on-the-ground historic change through social media, but that's a subject for another post.) In addition to last night's apparently successful #nomaintenance insta-protest against a Twitter service outage, a handful of different actions are bubbling out of the online mix as ways to engage in Iran from afar...

As we all know, in international diplomacy a word choice here or there can mean the difference between smooth international engagement and a diplomatic tussle. Now, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has, as we've been tracking, been extolling the power of "digital diplomacy" -- the idea that we tech-savvy Americans can meaningfully interact with our counterparts around the world. The future of the U.S. image abroad is in our hands. But few of us are trained diplomats. So what if we goof, blog something impolitic, and set off World War III?

At a Center for American Progress event yesterday, reports NextGov, Alec Ross, the State Department advisor charged with bringing innovation to Foggy Bottom, admitted that "social media is a messy space and government doesn't always lend itself to messy spaces." But Ross argued that a sense of context and proportionality should guide digital diplomacy, here in the context of empowering those within government to engage freely online:

Ross responded that the context of the online discussion, whether the topic is war negotiations or commercial trade, for instance, should determine when it is permissible for a federal employee to speak about State business. "There are different levels of appropriateness and openness for each of those contexts," he said.

Ross pointed to Secretary Clinton's Text Swat program -- which used cell phone SMS texting to send relief monies to Pakistan's war-torn Swat Valley -- as a taste of what tech-powered 21st century statecraft might entail. (State Department photo by Jose Luis Arnal)

As our Ari Melber noted below, we and other commentators have taken note that Secretary Hillary Clinton's State Department embraced the Internet with gusto -- taking to the web not only as a work tool, but as a potential change agent around the globe. A major case in point is the delegation of representatives of American tech companies including including Twitter, Google, MeetUp, AT&T, Blue State Digital, and Wordpress sent by the State Department to Baghdad in late April. The goal of the official trip was to impress upon Iraqis that social media can help to knit together their society, connecting the Iraqi people eager to rebuild their country with those leaders working at great risk to do the same.

That vision of a progressive, modern Iraq was a primary reason why the total absence of American women on the trip was so striking. The pursuit of an inclusive new Iraq set in sharp relief the fact that of the dozen or so members of the American delegation, not a single one was female. For some observers, the lack of gender diversity took the sheen off of an otherwise intriguing outreach mission. So I recently asked the State Department's Jared Cohen, who helped lead the trip to Iraq, to explain how the skewed composition of the trip's delegation came to pass...