Second "electronic embassy" idea

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Posted-Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1993 13:53:51 -0500
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1993 13:53:51 -0500
To: Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
From: John Perry Barlow <barlow () eff org>
Subject: Possible somehing for Interesting People?


> Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1993 13:50:38 -0700 (MST)
> From: The future Ross Stapleton-Gray <STAPLETON () BPA ARIZONA EDU>
> To: barlow () eff org
> Subject: Second "electronic embassy" idea
>
> [John, here's a second idea re "electronic embassies" that occurred to me 
> while standing in line for coffee at Borders... Ed Vielmetti guesstimates 
> the costs at roughly $0.25M, which is peanuts compared to other things the 
> government does.   This could be a great "foot in the door" for bringing 
> government online, and productive from day one...   Ross]
>
>
>
> Subject:   A Foreign Embassy Information Infrastructure
> Author:    Ross Stapleton, Intelligence Community Management Staff
>
>
> The US Government should organize and subsidize the creation of an 
> Internet-based information infrastructure for the foreign embassies 
> sited in Washington DC, in order to encourage those embassies to host 
> information of interest to US audiences, to facilitate delivery of 
> US government information to those embassies (and through them, to 
> the sponsoring countries' governments and populace), and to 
> establish a better means for US citizens to correspond with foreign 
> governments.
>
>
> The Washington DC-based diplomatic community is a convenient scope for
> such a program: having the prospective users local to Washington would
> make them easier to train and support through the start-up phase; the 
> existing US information infrastructure is much better than many 
> parts of the international and foreign infrastructure; and many or 
> most of the embassies are already repositories for information (albeit
> largely in nonelectronic form today) that they could be encouraged to 
> provide to a US audience.
>
> There are a total of XX embassies in the Washington DC area, along 
> with YY foreign and international government missions.
>
> The program would have three major goals:
> 1. Provide a means for foreign governments, initially through their 
> embassies, to provide a broad range of information of interest to US 
> citizens through the developing US information infrastructure;
> 2. Provide the US government a faster, more efficient, and more direct
> means of providing a broad range of information of interest to foreign
> governments, initially through their embassies (in both the first two 
> goals, it could be expected that embassies would also develop better 
> means to exchange information with their sponsoring governments--very 
> likely though the Internet--and to lessen their obligation to serve as
> intermediaries);
> 3. Provide a focus for US citizen interest in foreign countries, for 
> correspondence with foreign officials and governments.
>
> As one possible implementation strategy, the US State Department could
> commission the creation of an Internet site (e.g., a domain of 
> "embassies.int") and provide funding for service, support and 
> training, as well as for some amount of communications equipment to be
> provided to participating embassies (the last might be unnecessary 
> where participating embassies could provide their own resources, or 
> where corporate or other sponsors might be found to contribute 
> resources).   At a minimum, each participating embassy would have at 
> least one Internet account (e.g., "ecuador () embassies int") for 
> electronic mail purposes.   Each embassy that chose to expand its 
> investment in the facility could be provided with its own subdomain 
> (e.g., "france.embassies.int") for the provision of additional 
> services.
>
> Each participating embassy should agree at a minimum to provide (1)
> simple correspondence, which need be nothing more than an 
> auto-response message instructing on how to reach the embassy via 
> traditional means (telephone, fax or letter), (2) basic information on
> embassy services (e.g., how to receive and file forms for visas), and 
> (3) additional information (economic, cultural, etc.) likely to be
> of interest to a US audience, in order to build up the program's 
> general information resources, to be made available to the public 
> through standard Internet research tools (e.g., WAIS, Gopher, etc.).
>
> The US State Department, with other US foreign policy agencies, would 
> make use of the program for the dissemination, to the embassies, of 
> policy and other materials.   This would provide the US government 
> with an efficient and timely means to disseminate information to the 
> whole of the participating embassy community (and this could be done 
> in a manner that would permit the embassies to "pull" information of 
> interest rather than have it "pushed" at them, allowing for a far 
> greater volume of information to be made available without 
> overburdening the recipients).