When the crowd gathered yesterday morning in Washington's Newseum to hear Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's big speech on the topic "Internet freedom" included Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, Here Comes Everybody author Clay Shirky, Delaware Democrat Ted Kaufman, Meetup founder Scott Heiferman, US Deputy Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin, the Atlantic's Jim Fallows, the State Department's new media team (Alec Ross, Katie Dowd, Jared Cohen), DC-based representatives from Facebook, and Oscar Morales, the Colombian man who used Facebook to rally millions in the streets to protest his country's leftist guerilla oppressors, it was a pretty good sign that you were in for an interesting day. It was perhaps because the crowd was itself so intriguing that it took some time for the audience to realize that Clinton had silently made her way to the stage; it was a split second before they began applauding for the Secretary of State.

What quickly became so attention grabbing about Clinton's speech, at least of our purposes, was how full-throated a defense it was of the potential of a fully networked society and fully networked world. We'll be pulling out some of the more noteworthy parts of the hour-long speech, but you can read the full text (or watch the video of it) here...

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.

Cross-posted at Huffington Post

Micah Sifry has written a widely discussed essay about the denuded Obama grassroots movement, touching on a broad range of issues, from the campaign team's exertion of top-down control to their missteps post-election to the myth-making and marketing of hope and change. There have been a couple of extended critiques and Sifry has written a series of follow-ups to address questions raised by his thesis.

I'd like to focus on one important aspect of the original essay, namely the motivating factor(s) behind Obama's grassroots support.

"Smart power meets smart design." How's that for killing two messaging birds with one stone?

Secretary Hillary Clinton's State Department and its new media team, led by Clinton presidential campaign veteran Katie Dowd, has just launched a revamped State.gov website. Driving the redesign was the idea that the State Department's online presence could do a better job of handling the more, well, boring part of its responsibilities -- assisting travelers with passports, circulating travel advisories -- while also boosting the profile of the more exciting elements of its mission: namely spearheading U.S. foreign policy around the globe.

Gone are the old pro forma website verticals like press information, career postings, and resources for kids and other young one. Now, State.gov's site navigation draws attention to the ambitious policy thrusts that Secretary Clinton would like to make the centerpieces of her tenure at the department. Headlining the site now are tabs for Economics & Energy, Arms Control & Security, Democracy & Global Affairs, Public Diplomacy & Public Affairs, and similarly weighty topics. And, reflecting Clinton's rather remarkable public embrace of all things social media since she's become Secretary of State, the site gives prime homepage real estate to both Twitter and the department's frequently updated DipNote blog.

"Secretary Clinton has long recognized the power of the Internet and its embodiment of the fundamental democratic principals of our nation," Dowd tells techPresident, echoing a recent push by the State Department to embue digital technologies with political meaning under the banner of 21st Century Statecraft. "She is devoted to growing worldwide public engagement, with State.gov serving as a vital component of this effort."

Now maybe Clinton can have a word with her old colleagues on the Senate Armed Services Committee about their website -- which looks like it hasn't been polished since 1998.

A message from Secretary Clinton about the new site:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in conjunction with the office of special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, is about five days into an experiment mobile phones to build civil society in Pakistan. Working with three local cell phone companies and a U.S.-based mobile vendor, the State Department has set up in Pakistan what it is calling Humari Awaz. That's "Our Voice" in what seems to be Urdu. Here, in brief, is how it works: Pakistanis text in keywords to the network via the short code 7111, and those phrases are used to spontaneously create texting-based social lists -- around the day's price for cotton, the latest cricket scores, a community radio station's fan base, or perhaps the desire for less extremist political leadership.

The State Department is covering the cost of the first 24 million texts to Humari Awaz. How long that reserve will last remains to be seen. Less than a week in, and more than half a million SMS messages have been sent over the State-sponsored mobile network thus far. Visit ProPakistani for a taste of some of the suspicions and concerns the plan is raising in that country.

The Humari Awaz project is part of the Clinton State Department's push toward what it calls "21st century statecraft." In related news, Secretary Clinton recently announced while in Morocco that State was launching a "Civil Society 2.0" initiative, centered around providing education and training on the building blocks of digital literacy -- building a website, working with text messages, blogging, using a social network to create social change, and more. Clinton also announced $5 million in CS2.0 monies to be dedicated to "bolster[ing] the new media and networking capabilities of civil society organizations and promot[ing] online learning" in the Middle East and North Africa.

An interesting note jumps out from Hillary Clinton's big speech before the Council on Foreign Relations today. Clinton highlighted the fact that the State Department's important work on the the digital front has included "keep[ing] technologies up and going." That seems to me to be an obvious reference to the much-noted fact that a State Department Policy Planning staffer reached out to Twitter during the post-election uprising in Iran and asked them to keep their system running, instead of going ahead with scheduled downtime. Rather that shying away from outreach that could read as meddling in Iran's internal affairs, Clinton is embracing it. Her full remarks on the topic are after the jump.

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."

Like dogs and cats living together, my friends. Like dogs and cats living together. The State Department has announced that it will be importing a bit of West Coast thinking to Washington DC, hosting a two-hour session of TED talks right there in Foggy Bottom at 2:30pm ET today. The State Department, which has appeared eager to innovate since the start of the Obama Administration, says this afternoon's session marks the first government-sponsored TED talks in the history of the republic. Officially, today's event -- featuring the likes of Hans Rosling, Stewart Brand, Clay Shirky, and other big thinkers -- is being hosted by the State Department's Global Partnership Center, which is the wing of the department responsible for forging public-private partnerships. From the State Department press release announcing what it's calling "TED@State"... (Keep reading)

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)

Via CitizenTube, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton keeps up her encouraging but somewhat ethereal call for all Americans to engage in tech-powered "21st century statecraft." Relatedly, we're keeping an eye on State's website for more details on how the promised Virtual Student Foreign Service might work.