small talk 2.0

Israel Center for International Cooperation (MASHAV, acronym in Hebrew) is a division in Israel's Foreign Ministry, and functions as a national Foreign Aid Agency. Since its creation in 1958, MASHAV has trained about 250,000 people from 140 countries, in Israel and in developing countries, providing training in a variety of areas, including agriculture, public health and medical programs, community development, integrated rural regional development and other areas. Therefore, it was only natural for international agency like MASHAV to open up for social media. A year ago MASHAV created a fan page on Facebook - and it was the first fan page by the Israel's Foreign Ministry. Today MASHAV has more than 700 fans on facebook, but the number is less important than the profile of the fans. Many of them are people all around the world who participated in the Training Programs of MASHAV, and now they can keep in touch and be updated about the new programs, or raise ideas for new coopera...

The answer is simple - through the Social Web. Look what happened two weeks ago: Our Ministry's Legal department published on the official website of the Ministry and on the site of Civil Service Commision an announcement about open tender for recrtuiting lawyers. They had only 2 weeks deadline, and no option for newspaper ad. I suggested to publish the tender through social media, and they Oked. They had no choice... Then it was just a matter of two hours effort. With the help of two of my colleagues who are, like me, fans of Web 2.0, we put the announcement on the forums and groups run by lawyers for lawyers - on Cafe the Marker, Nana 10, Tapuz, groups on facebook and LinkedIn. What took more time, were some groups that required approval for joining. But after the approval that took 3-4 days, the information was placed there as well. In 10 days since we started this "web 2.0 recruitment campaign", we had hundreds of applicants, and were over-flooded with the phone cal...

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. T...