State Department Sounding Board
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State Department Sounding Board
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked for the creation of an online forum for State Department employees to submit ideas directly to the Secretary. The Sounding Board was an intranet blog developed and launched in February 2009 by staff from the State Department's Office of eDiplomacy. The platform metrics soon generated 27,000 page views a month and serves as a global water cooler for a workforce spread around the planet. It has served as a platform for brain-storming ideas and crowd sourcing non-policy solutions. Employee response to the online forum varied from enthusiasm to concern for maintaining confidentiality and decorum. Some contributors to the Sounding Board expressed worry that public airing of internal discussion might embarrass the Department of State; comments that were subsequently published in ''Washington Post'' reporter Al Kamen's column "In The Loop". The Sounding Board was an internal platform (discussion forum) for State Department employees to exchan ...
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US Secretary Of State
The United States secretary of state is a member of the executive branch of the federal government of the United States and the head of the U.S. Department of State. The office holder is one of the highest ranking members of the president's Cabinet, and ranks the first in the U.S. presidential line of succession among Cabinet secretaries. Created in 1789 with Thomas Jefferson as its first office holder, the secretary of state represents the United States to foreign countries, and is therefore considered analogous to a foreign minister in other countries. The secretary of state is nominated by the president of the United States and, following a confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, is confirmed by the United States Senate. The secretary of state, along with the secretary of the treasury, secretary of defense, and attorney general, are generally regarded as the four most crucial Cabinet members because of the importance of their respective depar ...
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Hillary Clinton
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton ( Rodham; born October 26, 1947) is an American politician, diplomat, and former lawyer who served as the 67th United States Secretary of State for President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, as a United States senator representing New York from 2001 to 2009, and as First Lady of the United States as the wife of President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001. A member of the Democratic Party, she was the party's nominee for president in the 2016 presidential election, becoming the first woman to win a presidential nomination by a major U.S. political party; Clinton won the popular vote, but lost the Electoral College vote, thereby losing the election to Donald Trump. Raised in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Rodham graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 and earned a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 1973. After serving as a congressional legal counsel, she moved to Arkansas and married future president Bill Clinton in 1975; the tw ...
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Internet Forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes publicly visible. Forums have a specific set of jargon associated with them; example: a single conversation is called a " thread", or ''topic''. A discussion forum is hierarchical or tree-like in structure: a forum can contain a number of subforums, each of which may have several topics. Within a forum's topic, each new discussion started is called a thread and can be replied to by as many people as so wish. Depending on the forum's settings, users can be anonymous or have to register with the forum and then subsequently log in to post messages. On most forums, users do not have to l ...
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US Department Of State
The United States Department of State (DOS), or State Department, is an executive department of the U.S. federal government responsible for the country's foreign policy and relations. Equivalent to the ministry of foreign affairs of other nations, its primary duties are advising the U.S. president on international relations, administering diplomatic missions, negotiating international treaties and agreements, and representing the United States at the United Nations conference. Established in 1789 as the first administrative arm of the U.S. executive branch, the State Department is considered among the most powerful and prestigious executive agencies. It is headed by the secretary of state, who reports directly to the U.S. president and is a member of the Cabinet. Analogous to a foreign minister, the secretary of state serves as the federal government's chief diplomat and representative abroad, and is the first Cabinet official in the order of precedence and in the p ...
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Intranet
An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, easier communication, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. The term is used in contrast to public networks, such as the Internet, but uses the same technology based on the Internet protocol suite. An organization-wide intranet can constitute an important focal point of internal communication and collaboration, and provide a single starting point to access internal and external resources. In its simplest form, an intranet is established with the technologies for local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs). Many modern intranets have search engines, user profiles, blogs, mobile apps with notifications, and events planning within their infrastructure. An intranet is sometimes contrasted to an extranet. While an intranet is generally restricted to employees of the organization, extranets may also be accessed ...
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Office Of EDiplomacy
The Office of eDiplomacy is an applied technology think tank for the United States Department of State. The Office of eDiplomacy is staffed by Foreign and Civil Service Officers, as well as contract professionals. There are four branches, the Diplomatic Innovation Division (DID), the Knowledge Leadership Division (KLD), the Customer Liaison Division (CLD), and the Business Requirements Unit (BRU). The unit was formed in response to recommendations from the 1999 Overseas Presence Advisory Panel that the State Department improve its ability to communicate and share knowledge. eDiplomacy's Customer Liaison Division facilitates and enhances communications between the Bureau of Information Resource Management and its domestic users. With a mandated goal of providing customer satisfaction with products, platforms and services developed by the IRM Bureau. In addition, the CLD collaborates with other U.S. Government agencies and multiple other entities to provide information services t ...
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Brain-storming
Brainstorming is a group creativity technique by which efforts are made to find a conclusion for a specific problem by gathering a list of ideas spontaneously contributed by its members. In other words, brainstorming is a situation where a group of people meet to generate new ideas and solutions around a specific domain of interest by removing inhibitions. People are able to think more freely and they suggest as many spontaneous new ideas as possible. All the ideas are noted down without criticism and after the brainstorming session the ideas are evaluated. The term was popularized by Alex Faickney Osborn in the classic work ''Applied Imagination'' (1953). History In 1939, advertising executive Alex F. Osborn began developing methods for creative problem-solving. He was frustrated by employees' inability to develop creative ideas individually for ad campaigns. In response, he began hosting group-thinking sessions and discovered a significant improvement in the quality and quan ...
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Crowd Sourcing
Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digital platforms to attract and divide work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. Crowdsourcing is not limited to online activity, however, and there are various historical examples of crowdsourcing. The word crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of "crowd" and " outsourcing". In contrast to outsourcing, crowdsourcing usually involves less specific and more public groups of participants. Advantages of using crowdsourcing include lowered costs, improved speed, improved quality, increased flexibility, and/or increased scalability of the work, as well as promoting diversity. Crowdsourcing methods include competitions, virtual labor markets, open online collaboration and data donation. Some forms of crowdsourcing, such as in "idea competit ...
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Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large national audience. Daily broadsheet editions are printed for D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. The ''Post'' was founded in 1877. In its early years, it went through several owners and struggled both financially and editorially. Financier Eugene Meyer purchased it out of bankruptcy in 1933 and revived its health and reputation, work continued by his successors Katharine and Phil Graham (Meyer's daughter and son-in-law), who bought out several rival publications. The ''Post'' 1971 printing of the Pentagon Papers helped spur opposition to the Vietnam War. Subsequently, in the best-known episode in the newspaper's history, reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led the American press's investigation into what became known as the Watergate scandal, ...
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Social Media
Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social media'' arise due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features: # Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications. # User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions—is the lifeblood of social media. # Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization. # Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups. The term ''social'' in regard to media suggests that platforms are user-centric and enable communal ac ...
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