The training program "Diplomacy in the age of Social Media", organized by the Training Department of the Israel MFA, started on November 2009, and we have only 2 meetings ahead of us. It's clear already now: the program was a real success. And we could measure it not only by the participants improved skills in using Social Media.
More than anything else, what we achieved in the course was the awareness of the participants, coming mainly from the generation of baby-boomers, to the need of going digital. Digital diplomats is not anymore a sci-fi for them, but something that could be done not in a life-time - 40 academic hours are quite enough!
Since many participants are experienced diplomats, and some of them are in senior positions in the Ministry, the whole idea of Diplomacy 2.0 and Government 2.0 now has more supporters. The bottom-up movement of Diplomacy 2.0 initiative will win gradually more supporters on all the levels, and the transformation will come inevitably. This is how we, evangelists of Social Media in government, should work.
See some pictures in the slideshow (below), taken on January 12, featuring the Youtube worksop and the presentation of Steve Ressler, founder of Govloop (US Government social network) who joined us through video-conference from Florida. He actually already wrote post about the video-conference:
http://www.govloop.com/profiles/blogs/thoughts-on-gov-20-and-israel?xg_source=activity
The program of our course could be reached here:
http://digitaldiplomacy.blogspot.com/2009/11/digital-diplomacy-program-of-course.html
We could and should go digital - it's easy and fun!
Yaron
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