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).
>
>