Matt Armstrong a while back highlighted the issue that America.gov had more followers listing their location as in America, than they did followers from the rest of the world.
I mapped the data he collected to demonstrate how the location of those followers could be broken down by region. By way of an update, here’s an alternative map of the same data.
please forgive the colours, they aren’t exactly the same as in the original, but I hope you’ll still get the idea.
Does it matter in Public Diplomacy terms if an organisation with which you partner is heavily criticised in an official report? This post continues from an earlier post on the British Council’s partnership with weapons manufacturer BAE Systems.
The earlier post focused on the considerations which must exist alongside the potential benefits of partnership in Public Diplomacy. Specifically, the need to identify those things an organisation will not give up at any price.
In this instance the financial support for British Council programmes provided by BAE systems may have brought with it certain risks to reputation, beyond the possible conflict some may feel exists when a cultural relations organisation, working to increase international understanding and bridge trust gaps in order to create harmony and prosperity for all, partners with a weapons manufacturer. The reputation of the organisation could be at risk as its partner BAE Systems faces prosecution over bribery allegations.
In addition, the independent review of the 2006 RAF Nimrod crash that killed 14 military personnel has delivered a damning verdict. Among those heavily criticised in the report were BAE Systems. The full report was so damning of BAE that I’ve included some of the longer sections below as abbreviation does not do them justice:
In contrast, the ‘Training Bridge‘ project run by the British Council and in which BAE Systems participates seeks to
The reality of Public Diplomacy partnerships, whether through the ‘Training Bridge’, UKIERI in India, or exchange programes in Saudi Arabia, is that the large financial resources of corporations such as BAE Systems can increase the reach and impact a Public Diplomacy organisation can achieve. However, these organisations also have their own agenda, methods and organisational culture. As the British Council website notes many of our business partners gain competitive advantage… from these partnerships.
The question for a Public Diplomacy organisation partnering or recieving sponsorship must be whether the increased impact is worth certain other risks.
This leads ultimately to the same conclusion as the previous post on this issue, an organisation must identify things which are not for sale – asking the question posed at the British Council Advisory Board 2007;
High on the list has to be credibility, without which the ability to engage in meaningful interaction with members of other communities and societies will be severely curtailed.
Posted in Cultural Relations, Public Diplomacy
Quick look at 3D network map.
This one of followers of FCO accounts on Twitter, will follow-up with further data.
Understanding importance or influence within a network depends in part on perspective; both the way you look at it and what your priorities are. The ability to view the map in 3D is all about understanding the network from its different perspectives.
We live in a networked world. Whether known as family, kinship, tribe, village, neighbourhood, community, work place colleagues, or online social network, they are all networks in the sense of being a series of relationships between different individuals.
Social network analysis (SNA) explores the relationship between actors within a network by identifying the points that people “huddle around”. The potential uses of SNA and network mapping are vast. It can be used to plan, develop and evaluate engagement for, among other purposes, public diplomacy and strategic communication.
This piece provides and introduction and demonstrates how it can be used to evaluate interaction on Twitter through the example of Dipnote and Americagov. Read in full
The response by individuals using Twitter to the Iranian election provides important perspectives for the scholarship and practice of Public Diplomacy.
The ability to map and analyze the interaction between Twitter accounts can provide a greater understanding of the response to a specific event, in this case the Iranian election, in a way not possible in narrative accounts. This same technique of mapping tweets also provides the potential to understand opportunities in conducting and evaluating PD 2.0
Analysis of Twitter usage following the Iranian election demonstrates that if Public Diplomacy 2.0 or digital diplomacy is to be truly successful – the ability to understand the actual interactions of social media users will have to become central to the planning and evaluation of programmes and initiatives.
Read full text on USC Center on Public Diplomacy Blog
Posted in Data mapping, Public Diplomacy
The current vogue for conducting Public Diplomacy through ‘partnerships’ and the movement in theory on collaborative / collective action can create some difficult challenges in practice.
For those who conduct Public Diplomacy in partnership with BAE Systems, the announcement that BAE Systems faces prosecution over bribery allegations, while as yet unproven, creates awkward questions. This comes just over a year after a separate investigation into BAE by the SFO was dropped in 2007 after it was decided that national security was at risk.
One such organisation working in partnership with BAE is the British Council, who places amongst its organisational values:
We demonstrate this by
The British Council has been running programmes in partnership with BAE Systems for almost 20 years. Although the allegations of corruption are unproven, they may still undermine the British Council’s commitment to increase international understanding and bridge trust gaps in order to create harmony and prosperity for all.
Partnerships with BAE have included the Post-doctoral Summer Research (PDSR) Programme in Saudi Arabia. The British Council website acknowledges that The programme is supported by BAE Systems, the major British company with overall responsibility for the Al-Yamamah programme. The Programme has been sponsored from its inception in 1991 by BAE Systems and administered by the British Council.
The Al-Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia has been the focus of a guardian investigation and an SFO investigation which the UK Government controversially halted in 2006. Tony Blair argued at the time that he believed an ongoing investigation would lead to complete wreckage of a relationship that is of fundamental importance of the security of this country and that the investigation would lead absolutely nowhere.
BAE Systems is also a corporate partner of the UK India Education and Research Initiative UKIERI. Martin Davidson (British Council CEO) identified in his introduction to the British Council Annual Report 07/08 that one way to increase impact is to run more programmes in partnership with others. For example UKIERI is a unique programme involving 11 funding partners. UKIERI is run with corporate partners BAE Systems, BP, GlaxoSmithKline and Shell. Martin Davidson concludes If we are to achieve our growth objectives, we recognise that we need to increase our ability to develop successful partnerships such as UKIERI
Partnership with the British Council is advertised on their website as helping many of our business partners gain competitive advantage in an increasingly challenging global market place … many companies also welcome the opportunity to work with us as a way of underlining their company values and commitment to corporate social responsibility.
The example of the partnership between BAE Systems and the British Council demonstrates the real risk which Public Diplomacy organisations can face in expanding their engagement in partnerships. Ironically, it was the British Council’s advisory board meeting in 2007 The Meaning of Partnership which posed many of the pertinent points for consideration when any PD organisation begins to consider partnership.
And the final, and most salient question
Posted in Cultural Relations, Public Diplomacy
Matt Armstrong posed this question on Mountainrunner. The coding of the data he had gathered was crowdsourced via twitter. This has allowed him to run an analysis of the global audience of a government initiative run on a social media application.
The result of his analysis demonstrates that 67% – 70% of the audience is a demographic the organisation is not supposed to target. In numbers terms, 982 of the nearly 2000 individuals for which there was data, self-identified their location as in the United States. Further data available on Mountainrunner.
This data provides a number of further points to consider, two of which are;
a) Location and nationality is not the same thing; though with no evidence either way an assumption on random distribution of citizens and visitors would indicate many individuals are likely to be US citizens.
b) What does the distribution of users look like, what are the common nodes within the network, both within the US and outside?
To start the process of visualising the network of individuals engaged in this initiative I’ve mapped the network using the coded data provided my Matt and his helpers.
This map & a higher resolution version of the map are available in png format, (may display better in Safari).
The lines on the map demonstrate how the individuals connect to particular locations and which continent that location belongs to. The dots identify the individuals their location as they defined it, and the relevant geographic area or continent. This allows clusters to identified around locations and comparison to be drawn between the audience in each geographic region.
As a number of individuals chose not to register a location, preferring ‘the blue planet’, ‘Earth’, or ‘the world’ these have all been grouped together.
This map is a fairly basic version of what these techniques can achieve; commentary on the map and how this can also be used to demonstrate or evaluate a Public Diplomacy organisation’s engagement with different themes within social media will follow shortly.
The evaluation of Government 2.0 initiatives using a network analysis approach, has demonstrated the importance of understanding the type of the network which is being engaged through social media. The value of consciously considering whether the initiative will be centralised around Government or dispersed throughout society should not be overlooked. This may unlock the potential of new ways of working including Open Source Public Diplomacy.
On Friday Canada House hosted Gov2Gov, an event presented by the Social Media Club and FutureGov Consultancy to discuss;
the changing nature of civic engagement and the relationships between citizens and their government, in which social media tools and the emergent ideals of Government 2.0 can be harnessed for better cross boundary collaboration and service to our citizens.
Joanne Jacobs was liveblogging at the event and comments via twitter #g2g give a feel for this very interesting event. Having taken part in this discussion about the future use of social media by governmental organisations I wanted to record some of my thoughts about the relationship between understanding networks and Government 2.0.
The potential governmental use of social media is inextricably linked to understanding of the network with which they seek to engage or that they seek to create.
The shift in ethos from that adopted through traditional channels of engagement to that most likely needed to use social media was a common theme of the discussion. A number of speakers emphasised the ability to listen to the voices of their constituency or to engage in dialogue through social medial.
This potential for listening and dialogue has the potential to empower collective action or collaboration on policy. To realise this potential, in line with the often discussed ethos of social media, governmental organisations will have to understand the form of network in which they are engaged. If they do not, experience demonstrates that the governmental approach to social media will adopt a centralised view of the network, where they act as if the universe revolves around them.
Thinking of government existing in a walled garden and using social media to invite audiences into an area they control is a limited and centralised view of the network. Being able to reach out into the areas around which communities coordinate, thinking of Governmental engagement with networks as decentralised or dispersed along side the centralised option, has the potential to make communication more effective. The view of genuine collaborative engagement and collective action via social media will become increasingly important as the governmental walled gardens that exist in the physical world are increasingly surrounded by anti-ram barriers and police with automatic weapons.
An example offered by Stephen Hale demonstrated the importance of understanding the difference between the centralised approach and collective action in a dispersed or decentralised network. The description of an engagement via Facebook described as leading to discussions with ministers prompted me to ask ‘what changed on the policy side as a result of your initiative and opportunity to engage in dialogue with ministers? The answer appeared to be nothing; policy remained the same as a result of this dialogue and it did not appear the intention had ever been to shift policy position on the basis of this dialogue (of the deaf). Photos on Flickr, video on YouTube, a group on Facebook, do not necessarily mean that social media is being used for dialogue or collective action. Government 2.0 will just be Gov 1 in new clothes if social media is used purely in this narrow centralised form.
Another example discussed at Gov2Gov, Exchanges Connect also emphasised a centralised understanding of the government position in relation to the networks with which governments engage. The aim of Exchanges Connect is to create an international social network to allow participants of exchanges to communicate, collaborate, connect.
Though created using Ning, this initiative requires individuals to go to a centralised site, rather than embedding this exchange within the tools they use regularly. In essence participants must come to and area administered by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State, rather than the State Dept. going to the points around which participants coordinate. Whether this matters really depends on the audience and type of engagement and organisation is aiming for, but looking at the site this morning there are 194 members of the ‘Fulbright Group’.
Keep in mind; The Fulbright Program operates in more than 155 countries and has provided over 285,000 participants — chosen for their academic merit and leadership potential — with the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research in each others’ countries and exchange ideas. Approximately 7,000 grants are awarded annually.
The centralised approach appears to create a gap between reference in rhetoric to social media and even open source ethos and many examples of engagement in practice. If the ethos is to be truly adopted this means a shift from building cathedrals to engaging with a bazaar, effectively working in a Gramscian market place of ideas. Without this shift, governmental officials will struggle to identify opportunities for genuine dialogue let alone for collaboration and collective action. This aspiration for dialogue appears regularly in the rhetoric about the use of social media by government officials but significantly less often in practice. I offered an extended argument of this point in Music for the Jilted Generation: Open Source Public Diplomacy.
This gap between rhetoric and practice may be interpreted as officials being disingenuous, but the benefit of the doubt makes it likely it was because governments regularly misunderstand their position within the network of those engaged in social media.
For example, hierarchies are often contrasted with networks. While there can be hierarchical and network based models of engagement, it is a mistake to think of hierarchies as something separate from networks. Hierarchies are a form of network and a method of arranging a network map within social network analysis.
So what? 2 considerations:
1) Failure to consider the type of network has a significant impact on the sustainability of the programme. This is particularly important when governmental organisations build centralised networks and subsequently stop their funding / involvement in the vain hope the network will continue working. Centralised networks from which the central hub is removed are the most likely to collapse.
Rather than revisit much of this here, Valdis Krebs and June Holley have written a good article on sustainable networks and the importance of recognising different roles / behaviour within a network.
2) If networks are largely considered as centralised around the governmental initiatives, there is a distinct risk that governments are missing the conversations their constituents are having about the issues that are important to them. They may also be missing opportunities to engage or increase the impact of their programmes. One illustrative example is the discussion I attended in which military organisations were concerned with getting greater video capability in the field.
The aim was to demonstrate to communities back home what they were facing and operations they were conducting in theatre. This discussion was almost totally detached from the numerous videos soldiers had taken with their mobile phones and uploaded to various sites across the web. (This included soldiers trading video / images of combat for credits on porn sites). Looking beyond the centralised approach would have provided this discussion not only with greater options. It also would have included in the discussion those videos and images already in the public domain and which in a centralised approach were almost invisible.
For Government 2.0 to unlock the potential of social media it will require;
We must avoid conducting Government 2.0 with a web 1 mentality.
Accepting the premise that there is a gap between academics and practitioners I considered the means to create a bridge for theoretical perspectives to enter practice, and equally for the reverse to occur.
Theory and practice are currently caught in a paradox, the environment is evolving fast with new players, new providers, new tools all forming a new network. Yet, engagement and discussion are slowed by definitional arguments about the discipline and bureaucratic turf wars. Reading some of the resulting definitions it is are hard to differentiate what PD methods could be used under that definition and which could not, as a result I argued that there is a need to look past definitional arguments to focus on the shared purpose – influencing behaviour – and through the shared focus discuss, share and exchange methodological insights.
Online engagement is one means for exchange, practitioners and academics engage through DipNote, MountainRunner, USC’s PD Blog and John Brown’s Press and blog review among many others. Some of the links can be seen through TouchGraph which creates an image of the Google related pages database.
Approaching the gap between theory and practice from a network perspective it is clear that individuals are needed to act as a physical bridge between academics and practitioners. However, a bridge is fine but will do little by itself; there needs to be something to go across the gap.
For academics to influence the world of practice, should they chose to do try, their approach might be to consider how they can engage in R&D for tools which meet the immediate challenges of the practitioner, while embodying the theoretical perspective the academic seeks to promote.
In effect, as I argue in the presentation, the gap between theory and practice might bridged to some extent by better Networked R&D.
Posted in 'Listening', Network analysis, Public Diplomacy, networks
