From E-diplomacy Geneva to E-diplomacy Rome (via Malta)

We interviewed a number of people at the Geneva E-diplomacy Day, 10 days ago, interested to see how this audience compared to others. Paul Connealy from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has the depth of experience and range of contacts which makes him a particularly interesting commentator on e-diplomacy, since he has seen other waves come and go, and can see how this one is evolving.

Tilana Grobbelaar, from the South African Permanent Mission to the UN in Geneva, typifies many of the participants: an experienced professional, aware of and interested in new developments, but having to wait for the culture within her organisation to catch up.

We will be posting more interviews and recordings from some of the sessions in Geneva. We also recorded all the presentations – well, TED-talk style presentations, in most cases – from the Innovation in Diplomacy conference in Malta last week and they will also be uploaded in the next week or so. There was much depth and richness in the event so I am looking forward myself to being able to digest them. We summarised a few in a number of blog posts last week.

Tomorrow in Rome we are holding the next event in the series E-diplomacy Days which Diplo is co-organising with different partners. E-diplomacy Rome is in two parts. In the morning we are at the Istituto Diplomatico where we will have very practical sessions in the computer labs. Later, at the Canadian Embassy, Mark McDowell will be describing weiplomacy – the ground-breaking work being done with the Chinese social network Weibo, as Mark described in an earlier interview for Diplo.