It is rarely a good idea to mix up an image of your home town with another one of the same name… yet that’s exactly what Birmingham in the UK did… getting an image of Birmingham, Alabama, instead.

BBC News covered the Story

The many different approaches to communication can both compete with and enrich other areas of communication. The combination of communication and development work, as organisations such as PANOS have done, demonstrates much from which others can learn. Equally the experience of health promotion over the years provides useful insight.

To reiterate, while many may practitioners and theorists have emphasized perceptions, asserting identity or understanding, it is the action which the target audience takes that has an impact on the international environment.

Discussions of understanding, even mutual understanding, provide convenient ways of engaging with a ‘two way’ narrative on Public Diplomacy, yet even those genuinely engaged in dialogue, collaboration or open source approaches do so for a purpose. The question is what behaviour is the practitioner trying to encourage? That behaviour may be the sharing of ideas, the development of habits of engagement, acting in a less hostile manner or taking action on climate change. In any case, it is the behaviour on which the practitioner should be focused and anything else is part of the journey to get there.

The Future Embassy Report argued that “(t)he truest test of the value to our nation of the U.S. diplomatic presence abroad is whether the people we ask to represent us effectively promote American values and interests” (p. iv). However, in many instances the PD approach does not stretch further than policy advocacy, the justification of certain actions or the rebuttal of inaccurate or unfavourable comment.

The engagement with KAP Gap, with much of the development in the field of health including HIV / AIDS, provides a useful way of breaking down PD into different component parts while focusing on an end goal. Recognising the journey and the causes for the gap between Knowledge and Practise, as highlighted in the HIV / AIDS study, can inform the refinement of an approach focused on behaviour. The overlap here with Everett Rogers work on the Diffusion of Innovations, and the importance of diffusion curves is also worth noting.

This however, begins to focus on a pressing question – how much of PD, particularly politically focused advocacy gets beyond the K of Knowledge? While attempts to ‘explain’ or ‘promote’ through advocacy are popular, PD must constantly seek more broad approaches to creating positive attitudes to certain behaviour. This means taking the impact on the environment in which you seek to communicate into account, not merely the message.

I’ll merely note at this time the tonnage of material produced on refining messages, creating message chains, brand, memes, audience analysis to test phrases, constructing echo chambers, running focus groups etc. with the comparatively small focus given to non-assertive methods of engagement. It is currently comparatively rare to find work which focuses on promoting an environment in which people can adopt certain behaviour, rather than advocating the behaviour itself. Equally, consider how often political leaders ‘Call on’ someone to do something (admittedly often they are playing to a domestic audience) when the very act of that call creates an environment in which it is harder for the individuals concerned to adopt the behaviour which that politician is trying to promote. This is particularly problematic when the ‘call’ actually strengthens the opposition’s counter-narrative by painting an individual as doing the bidding of foreign masters. For example, James Glassman’s CFR speech can be seen as creating this problem, for the dispersed networks who seek to challenge violent groups.

PD is about behaviour and a broad range of approaches should be in play. KAP Gap, diffusion curves and derivations of this type of thinking should be more frequently deployed within many of the international communications organisations which are currently focused on ‘K’ without fully understanding the blocks which are preventing movement to ‘A’ or ’P’.

A useful discussion and explanation of KAP Gap and the way information flows through an audience or network was presented by Thomas Valente in his article The Diffusion Network Game. (p. 30).

As a footnote for another day, The Diffusion Network Game also highlights the way a relatively basic network mapping exercise could be conducted to demonstrate the impact that a PD initiative which was intended to develop links between participants. This might provide a start point for engaging with data maps and dispersed networks.

Picking up on the last discussion of power and the articulation of power in relation to ‘allies’, it is also worth considering the power relationship with the potential target community when planning PD activities.

In Options for Influence, we discussed the options which exist between telling and listening. At the ‘telling’ or message orientated end of the spectrum the audience is viewed by the PD organisation as a classic recipient of a crafted point. The programme is designed to advocate / assert that point (which is hopefully based on strong audience analysis). The research in this case is not a negotiation; it is working out how best to articulate a point in a way that it will have the highest chance of acceptance by the audience.

(Image source; Ali Fisher and Aurelie Brockerhoff, Options for Influence, p. 25)

Deliberate and genuine Listening exercises, as I have written before, sit at the other end of the spectrum. They focus on building habits of engagement by inverting the power relationship to be on the terms defined by the ‘audience’ or target community. This is not to say the listening exercise as having no point; it merely communicates that point through a shifted power relationship, where such a shift is useful to long-term engagement.

This won’t work if the listening is merely an opening for an intensified assertive campaign, as the power relationship immediately reverts to that of teller and the told. However, by building habits of engagement it can create an opportunity for greater openness, on both sides, for negotiation or exchange. It can equally allow for the identification of areas for a PD organisation to engage in facilitation or through which to engage with the target communities in collective action to achieve common goals.

Nothing here should be taken to indicate messaging is irrelevant, it isn’t. However, we need to consider not only what we wish to communicate by the power relationship through which that will be communicated. At times an assertive and dominant stance will create an image of authority and aid transmission of the message. At others an engagement which inverts that power relationship will provide the community with the ability to engage (rather than be the target of engagement).

Power and influence are not only those things which are claimed to valorise projects to political masters; they are also evident to the audience. We need to consider that power relationship alongside the goals for any PD initiative; after all it is one of the key elements which will influence the success of that initiative.

James Glassman’s first speech on his vision for Public Diplomacy, hosted at the Council for Foreign Relations, provides an interesting view of the tensions that arise when the US perspective on Public Diplomacy is articulated. To be fair to Glassman, the tensions he faces are not unique to the US. They are problematic for any Government engaging in forms of Public Diplomacy that emphasise cooperation, collaboration or network engagement, while justifying that engagement to the taxpayer as part of a national interest. The difficulty of engaging with the network comes down to a question of power, actual and perceived, and the articulation of that network by those spending government money.

The dilemma for the Government practitioner is this: to realise the true power of a distributed (or dispersed) network online, an international actor must give up the image of hierarchical position so ingrained in the methodology of the traditional diplomat. Otherwise, any engagement is predicated on the Government official as leader. The ensuing tension which faces Glassman (amongst many others) is that, while domestically there is a need to appear to be a powerful influence leading the war of ideas, within the networked engagement they need to be acting as a peer.

This difficulty with political rhetoric about network engagement is best outlined through the same example Glassman used when talking about networks in Public Diplomacy, specifically the suggestion by Daniel Kimmage of engaging with networks online as part of the public diplomacy effort.

First was everyone in this exercise on the same page? Kimmage wrote “we should do everything we can to empower them” whereas Glassman argued that the US would lead “them”. If empowerment, outside a centralised network model, requires an engagement with members of a network on the basis of being a peer, it probably wasn’t the best idea to repeat Senator Joe Lieberman’s comment that James Glassman was “the supreme allied commander in the war of ideas”. Such an attitude, even in jest, may be ill-suited to the engagement or empowerment of peer networks who do not take kindly to the idea that they ultimately work for America.

Of course, public diplomacy may be concerned with the achievement of goals in the national interest. The problem is not with that goal per se but with the blurring of the national and global interest amidst the assertion of leadership. Glassman’s ill-defined invocation of a “we” leading the war of ideas could be read as the United States or perhaps more narrowly as him and his colleagues. It cannot realistically be any broader than the US, however, as this would beg the question, “who are the followers?”

There’s a fair chance that some of those non-Americans who, like Glassman, want to see an end to the violent extremism do not want to have their efforts undermined by a) being told America is leading the struggle in which they are engaged and b) having their arguments challenged not on their merits but on the basis of American policy. The power of a genuinely networked approach is that each actor is independent, each engages on the basis of being a peer, and each makes his/her own arguments. The power of this approach is fundamentally undermined if one group claims that they are leading all the other groups.

This flaw in Glassman’s presentation is particularly unfortunate, since he has edged closer to the networked approach in his hope for spontaneous support of US Government projects or the creation of independent ones by business and academia. Such initiatives lose any potential benefit from being ‘independent’, if anyone opposing them merely needs to look on CFR.org, or America.gov to find a quote which, taken in context, claims that the US Government is leading the war of ideas.

Why does independence matter? As Glassman noted in the speech, the most “credible voices are Muslim voices” or, to put it more generally, local voices (locality being the perception of geographic, ethnic, religious or cultural proximity). Nick Cull made this point in Engagement: Public Diplomacy in a Globalised World when he wrote “Sometimes the most credible voice in public diplomacy is not one’s own.” The negative corollary of this is that claiming the voice as your own will undermine its credibility.

Ironically, Glassman’s speech highlighted a good example of where the image of independence was important. In claiming the network of the Congress for Cultural Freedom as a cold war success, Glassman overlooks an important aspect of that organisation – its funding from the US Government was covert, as indeed was Washington’s support of the British journal Encounter and many other “cultural” outlets. Today we have the reverse, and perverse, situation of a network of organisations and individuals who are taking on violent groups not only without US funding but with the handicap of American officials claiming leadership over them.

This is one of the core tensions for the traditional Public Diplomats and their attempt to engage in the non-centralised networks of the 21^st century. They have to lose any hierarchical notions and be prepared to engage as an equal in a peer to peer environment. If they can prove themselves worthy, they may be able to have higher than average influence in the network. That has to be earned during the engagement, however; it is not inherited because the traditional influence of the diplomat’s position.

To engage with the true power of the dispersed network to take on violent groups, those public diplomats who work in the political sphere must find a way of articulating the collective which does not damage the ability of independent groups to appeal to their audience. While it is useful to claim that everyone works for you, there are times when “they” will only work for you if you can subsume the national into the collective, rather than branding the collective as ‘American’.

A key part of the Dispersed Networks project is considering them as networks of influence -

When engaged in any form of international communication, public diplomacy, cultural relations, or whatever other label practitioners or theorists wish to put on the work, the aim of the activity is not just changing people’s perceptions, but rather influencing the way people act. The recent article by Eytan Gilboa discussed at length the conceptualization of public diplomacy in its many iterations and understandings. However, while many may practitioners and theorists have emphasized perceptions, asserting identity or understanding, it is the action which the target audience takes that has an impact on the international environment.

Influence can easily be read as relating to the one way communication of message projection, memes and propaganda. These are certainly about influence. However, it is also important to consider influence as encompassing other areas; specifically through listening, empowerment and developing habits of engagement.

Power down the transmitter made the case for the potential of listening exercises to be considered a form or engagement and as such a method of influence as it has the potential to alter the way individuals behave toward an organisation. That behaviour is an action, influenced by involvement in a listening exercise.

Seeking ways to empower individuals from within a community to take action is also be a means of influence; yet crucially this need not predetermine a message. This is because a message spoken in an individuals own ‘voice’ and within the social / cultural expectations of the community is more likely to resonate than one which is projected into a community by an outsider (whether or not it is actually spoken by a co-opted ‘insider’). In the case of empowerment a programme aims to influence the ability of an individual to act rather than determine the message they will produce, though clearly selection of the target individuals or communities will depend on the action they are likely to take.

Encouraging habits of engagement is an equally important role for influence which can facilitate either greater understanding between groups or a reduction in intercommunity tension. Developing these habits of engagement is about creating a context or opportunity. Finding means to encourage those habits of engagement is a form of influence, but again not one focused on a particular message but rather encouraging / facilitating certain behaviour.

These examples highlight the importance of an expanded understanding of influence. The forms of influence discussed here should not be considered as having no purpose because they do not predetermine the message. They focus on the desired action and attempt to bring that about through other means than projection.

In common with narrower understandings of influence, the examples discussed here are still focused on a particular group or community from whom a desired outcome is sought. Furthermore, the action may be in line with a specific policy objective, on the other hand it may be part of a mutual exchange. In both cases the target community must be influenced to act either favourably toward the policy or to partake in the exchange.

In this broader understanding of influence target communities may be influenced by:

1) Direct projection of certain prescribed messages, memes and images while avoiding proscribed alternatives.

2) Enabling that community to act in a certain manner (not because they are told what to say or are repeating messages they have heard) but because they engaged in an activity because they identify with the outcome they envisage resulting from the engagement and have been empowered to become involved either through the provision of skills or the creation of a context conducive to action.

It is on this broader understanding of influence which the engagement with dispersed networks of influence rests.

As I’ve starting to pull together the elements for a project on dispersed networks of influence, I thought I’d better start by thinking about the idea of networks in Public Diplomacy and then more specifically dispersed networks.

Within the study of public diplomacy there has been various discussions about networks vs. hierarchies. For example RS Zaharna in The Network Paradigm of Strategic Public Diplomacy, Jamie Metzl in Network Diplomacy, Brian Hocking, in many of his publications including “Rethinking the ‘New’ Public Diplomacy” or my own “PD in the UK” at The Present and Future of Public Diplomacy: A European Perspective. These discussions make the argument for a commitment to genuine two-way dialogue and openness which is contrasted with a one-way hierarchical approach. When combined with discussions of online networks and social spaces and concepts such as David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla’s The Promise of noöpolitik or discussions of Netwar the need to unpack the approach collectively described as the network model is evident.

Hierarchy vs. Network discussions have challenged Public Diplomacy theorists and practitioners to think beyond the hierarchical. In taking up this challenge there is a need to engage with different understandings of networks and particularly begin to unpack ‘the network model’ into its many component parts. In doing so it is obvious that a hierarchy in itself must be a specific type of network.

One useful distinction to begin the unpacking process is centralised / decentralised networks. The discussions of these networks range from the centralised ‘walled gardens’ of online commerce to server systems and peer-to-peer file sharing systems. Rather than replicate, Baran’s Forgotten Idea is well worth reading on the description of centralised and decentralised. It also highlights the development of the distributed concept; of building in redundancy to create a multi channel system capable of withstanding a nuclear strike as an alternative to attempting to harden a centralised system against a nuclear strike. In considering online network I touched briefly on the work of Paul Baran but it is worth revisiting it here and particularly the implication behind the concept of a distributed communications network as Baran described it, as this leads to a rationale for referring to dispersed (rather than distributed) networks of influence.

In the report On Distributed Communications “(t)he payoff in terms of survivability for a distributed configuration in the cases of enemy attacks directed against nodes, links, or combinations of nodes and links is demonstrated”. However, what is clear from the post attack calculations of redundancy requirements is that in a distributed conception the nodes are yours to distribute. As a result the initial thinking about distributed systems is based on ownership.

What I want to do in thinking about dispersed networks is push beyond those networks which an organisation owns or has a degree of control over. By using ‘dispersed’ the project considers not how an organisation distributes its own resources but how it can engage with participants in other networks. Perhaps this could be described as collaboration, but dispersal goes further than formal collaboration into areas of empowerment and influence.

Dispersal has many important roles in nature and many equations exist to calculate those effects. The purpose of the project on dispersed networks of influence is to understand how international communications organisations can operate in a way that engages with networks they do not control, without having to resort to projecting messages into them. While there are points of overlap, this is different from seeking to spread memes, as creating and starting to disseminate memes relies on the creative power of ‘owned’ resources. A distributed network of influence is about engaging with the resources and creative potential of others.

Working title for the project: The Dispersed Network Manifesto; using dispersed networks of influence until someone comes up with a better one…

Due to busy week I’ll just put two great links that demonstrate the importance of creating empowering links between peopel and particularly between different specialisms online.

Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics from TED and a site sharing the Many Eyes; A service that combines information visualization with social software, enabling collaborative visualization by groups of users.

Both highlight, as Eric Raymond discussed in the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the ways in which the power of many individual small efforts can be harnessed to create a large, powerful network based on collective effort.

The publication of Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere by John Kelly, and Bruce Etling at Harvard demonstrates the way in which mapping the networks of bloggers can provide and insight into the way they cluster around certain topics. This is the image that study produced;

Both image and report can be downloaded from Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The report offers insights both into the blogosphere itself and the techniques of mapping. It is based on the tendency for groups or networks to have common sources of information, key topics, and expressions, as well as links to each other. This sort of clustering has been highlighted by Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M Cook in BIRDS OF A FEATHER: Homophily in Social Networks.

This clustering is also important in understanding the way people interact in virtual worlds as Edward Castronova’s has demonstred in his analysis of online games.

This report pushes the understanding of the particular blogosphere which the authors identify well beyond what is possible from personal experience and expresses it in a way which text cannot. Just as the Harvard study was based on mapping followed by more detailed analysis of blogs at key points in the network, so an international communication programme can use the same technique to reach key members of a network.

Whether an organisation engages these key individuals with a messaging exercise, or dialogue designed to work toward collective action, will depend on the methodology of the organisation and the goal of the programme.

The rapid development of new technology has enabled the creation of mass instant communication and rapid information dissemination. This technology also allows rapid collection of data and the production of data maps and network diagrams. While I’ll pursue the important variations of network diagrams another day, today I’ll focus on highlighting the potential of these tools, both for the development of engagement strategies and collection and dissemination of information.

Anyone wanting to check out a network model for Facebook see Nexus or for the really cavalier just add the application and see how your friends are connected. This is what it may look like:

Data maps have a long history with important historical examples including John Snow’s work mapping Cholera deaths to identify the likely cause of an outbreak during 1854 in London. Through his work and the production of a data map he was able to identify of the community water pump in Broad Street as the source of the outbreak; there was a marked reduction in deaths from Cholera after the handle was removed from the pump.

So how can this be used to be more successful in international communication? There are many possibilities, one of which is to understand the links between and influences on bloggers. This can be done simply by looking at the sites, and using the tools which many bloggers display on their site; particularly blogroll and tag/ label clouds.

A blog roll is intended to demonstrate links with other bloggers or as leelefever put it:

A blogroll is a listing of websites that often appear as links on weblogs. This list of links is used to relate the site owner’s interest in or affiliation with other webloggers.

It is worth noting that “blogrolling” is a brand created by Jason DeFillippo which can be found at http://www.blogrolling.com/ .

So now you know who they want to be linked with (though there is likely be a hierarchical relationship to consider which will complicated the linking slightly, some links will be reciprocated, others will go unrequited).

Second, a number of bloggers use tag/label clouds; these are weighted displays of the tags/labels which a blogger used to identify content. Tag cloud is also a brand but some link the concept back to Microserfs. In a tag cloud the higher the weighting, usually based on frequency of use, the larger the text will appear in the cloud. If the methodology is of particular interest then TagCloud Drawing: Algorithms for Cloud Visualization may well be worth a read.

So Blogrolls show links, tag clouds show key elements which the blogger chooses to highlight. Add in an analysis of what in text links the bloggers use (which might indicate what else they are reading) and you start to build a data set which would allow you to start seeing the links, commonalities and gaps in the particular groups you are interested in.

Researchers including Lars Kirchhoff have been conducting, on a large scale, the analysis of blogs through Technorati. Equally an issue of Connections from 2001 which focuses on terrorist networks is well worth a read.

Interestingly, some of the information gathered from this type of analysis will be intuitive for those immersed in the network – of course we all read x and naturally we all have y on our blogroll but y doesn’t have us on theirs – additional things could be assumed or worked out – while further information comes as a surprise. However for an outsider to the network, this ‘insider’ knowledge is harder to come by. It could be developed overtime though engagement with the network, it could be explained by a friendly / co-opted member of the network or can be uncovered through a network analysis (most likely the best approach would be a combination of the three).

How does this help? If you can better understand who you are trying to communicate with, where they get their information, and the themes the users define as important (in a similar to the inverted power relationship in listening exercises) its likely that an actor will be able to identify its options more effectively.

So we’re good to go… well actually not quite, it may be worth also considering a mapping of the resources at your disposal. This image comes from an FAO assessment of soil nutrient balance, the ‘waste’ here is heading to the compost pit.

As discussed in a post on the importance of understanding the cost per member added to a network ensuring contacts are not wasted is an equally important of communications through both physical and virtual networks.

Being able to map the resources at an organisations disposal and the links, themes, nodes and hierarchies in a network with which it wishes to engage creates the potential for a more efficient engagement based on a stronger understanding of the environment.

This is just one introductory example and I’m sure experienced network analysts will want bigger data sets and more detailed discussion of the type of analysis, but for now, I’ll conclude that data maps and network analysis provide a means to develop;

- A clearer understanding of potential programme participants or audience

- An understanding that develops that understanding beyond a contact list and personal experience.

- A means of representing data which might be difficult to interpret at a list of text.

- A means of organising an organisations resources to reduce overlap or waste.

Before I do the post on data mapping and network analysis (and because I’m on holiday this week) Valdis Krebs and June Holley have written a very interesting article on the concept of ‘Network Weavers’ in building sustainable communities. It more than repays the time spent reading it.

thank you to RS Zaharna for alerting me to the article.