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.