Interesting People mailing list archives
Second "electronic embassy" idea
From: David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1993 06:50:02 +0900
Posted-Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1993 13:53:51 -0500 Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1993 13:53:51 -0500 To: Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu> From: John Perry Barlow <barlow () eff org> Subject: Possible somehing for Interesting People?
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1993 13:50:38 -0700 (MST) From: The future Ross Stapleton-Gray <STAPLETON () BPA ARIZONA EDU> To: barlow () eff org Subject: Second "electronic embassy" idea [John, here's a second idea re "electronic embassies" that occurred to me while standing in line for coffee at Borders... Ed Vielmetti guesstimates the costs at roughly $0.25M, which is peanuts compared to other things the government does. This could be a great "foot in the door" for bringing government online, and productive from day one... Ross] Subject: A Foreign Embassy Information Infrastructure Author: Ross Stapleton, Intelligence Community Management Staff The US Government should organize and subsidize the creation of an Internet-based information infrastructure for the foreign embassies sited in Washington DC, in order to encourage those embassies to host information of interest to US audiences, to facilitate delivery of US government information to those embassies (and through them, to the sponsoring countries' governments and populace), and to establish a better means for US citizens to correspond with foreign governments. The Washington DC-based diplomatic community is a convenient scope for such a program: having the prospective users local to Washington would make them easier to train and support through the start-up phase; the existing US information infrastructure is much better than many parts of the international and foreign infrastructure; and many or most of the embassies are already repositories for information (albeit largely in nonelectronic form today) that they could be encouraged to provide to a US audience. There are a total of XX embassies in the Washington DC area, along with YY foreign and international government missions. The program would have three major goals: 1. Provide a means for foreign governments, initially through their embassies, to provide a broad range of information of interest to US citizens through the developing US information infrastructure; 2. Provide the US government a faster, more efficient, and more direct means of providing a broad range of information of interest to foreign governments, initially through their embassies (in both the first two goals, it could be expected that embassies would also develop better means to exchange information with their sponsoring governments--very likely though the Internet--and to lessen their obligation to serve as intermediaries); 3. Provide a focus for US citizen interest in foreign countries, for correspondence with foreign officials and governments. As one possible implementation strategy, the US State Department could commission the creation of an Internet site (e.g., a domain of "embassies.int") and provide funding for service, support and training, as well as for some amount of communications equipment to be provided to participating embassies (the last might be unnecessary where participating embassies could provide their own resources, or where corporate or other sponsors might be found to contribute resources). At a minimum, each participating embassy would have at least one Internet account (e.g., "ecuador () embassies int") for electronic mail purposes. Each embassy that chose to expand its investment in the facility could be provided with its own subdomain (e.g., "france.embassies.int") for the provision of additional services. Each participating embassy should agree at a minimum to provide (1) simple correspondence, which need be nothing more than an auto-response message instructing on how to reach the embassy via traditional means (telephone, fax or letter), (2) basic information on embassy services (e.g., how to receive and file forms for visas), and (3) additional information (economic, cultural, etc.) likely to be of interest to a US audience, in order to build up the program's general information resources, to be made available to the public through standard Internet research tools (e.g., WAIS, Gopher, etc.). The US State Department, with other US foreign policy agencies, would make use of the program for the dissemination, to the embassies, of policy and other materials. This would provide the US government with an efficient and timely means to disseminate information to the whole of the participating embassy community (and this could be done in a manner that would permit the embassies to "pull" information of interest rather than have it "pushed" at them, allowing for a far greater volume of information to be made available without overburdening the recipients).
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