WORKSHOP: Designing Citizen Diplomacy

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a workshop to develop an intellectual and research agenda on the topics of citizen diplomacy and citizen networks. Citizen diplomacy and citizen networks are conceptualized as a technologically mediated form of soft-diplomacy. Citizen diplomacy raises intellectual scientific challenges for researchers that are by nature interdisciplinary: technical, economic and political, and social. Technical scientific research questions concern developing new capabilities for the mobile phone for use as a primary client, novel multimodal interaction environments, the reliability of a country?s infrastructure, and using technology to create incentives to participate. Political and economic research questions include studying government policy, Internet censorship, the cost of network use, and the instability of political climates. Social and cultural research questions include dealing with illiteracy, language differences, cultural awareness, finding others to participate, developing trust in others and in technology, managing system abuse and malicious behavior, and dealing with time zone differences. There is a critical need to develop a focused research agenda that outlines the scientific and technical challenges that effectively integrates these and other research topics to benefit from the socio-technical transformations of the world wide network. The development of technologies to support citizen diplomacy will benefit citizens of the United States as well as those in developing countries. Creating citizen networks between the developing and developed worlds will help to break down cultural, social, and political barriers. Taking such a ?bottom-up? approach with citizens may influence policy at national levels. People in both developed and developing countries will gain by learning new ideas and cultural practices. Above all, we expect that citizen diplomacy can expose young people to alternative life paths, thus limiting the impacts of local extremist views.