Dr Jovan Kurbalija spoke on capacity building for e-diplomacy at the International Conference on Challenges Facing the 21st Century Diplomat at the College of Europe in Bruges on 25-26 October 2011.
His presentation focused on cognitive illusion in introducing social media in e-diplomacy, triggered by a very low entry-point into social media and a very high bar for making social media communication effective.
He stressed: ‘While we can learn to write a blog or use Twitter or Facebook in a few hours, maximum one day, we need much longer, at least one month, to understand the social media milieu and how to frame messages and interact with others and much longer still to embed new ways of working into a team or an organisation.’
As a way to address this challenge, Dr Kurbalija presented Diplo’s e-diplomacy capacity building approach: one day (technical training), one month (individual proficiency) and one year (institutional capacity for social media coverage). Dr Kurbalija was appointed visiting professor at the College of Europe earlier this year.
Consult Dr Kurbalija’s blog post after the event and view the stream of live tweeting (#coleurope) during the event here.
