Stephen Hale

Head of Engagement, Digital Diplomacy

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Friday 02 October, 2009

Geneva Conventions at 60

Earlier this year we marked the 60th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions by running a small digital engagement exercise in partnership with the British Red Cross.

We:
- worked with FCO policy officials and the BRC to identify how digital engagement might be useful to them
- used a joint Foreign Office/Red Cross event at the end of June to launch a 6 week online consultation
- promoted the exercise via existing Red Cross and Foreign Office communities

And we've just published a joint action plan on the future of the Geneva conventions, based on the comments we received.

I enjoyed the process. It seemed to lend itself to digital engagement because we had:
- policy teams who really wanted to hear what people thought to help shape future policy
- a set time period, defined by physical events
- a partner with similar objectives and reach into specialist communities
- existing online communities of interest

At the centre of the engagement was our very simple consultation site - a homepage, and 5 pages for comment on particular themes. We started building it with the ubiquitous Wordpress Commentariat theme, although we stripped it down and changed it so much to meet our emerging user experience requirements that you probably wouldn't know what theme we started with from looking at it. As others often say, Wordpress is pretty good for this kind of thing.

We generated 57 published comments, some way short of our 200 target. But we were after quality rather than quantity, and I think that's reflected in the comments we received.

Our plan to promote the site was based on plugging into existing already-engaged Foreign Office and Red Cross communities, rather than seeking out new or general-interest users. Our stats show that as well as the people who followed links in our corporate websites, blogs and tweets, 518 different people arrived at the site from targeted Red Cross and FCO newsletters. By targeting people in this way I think we managed to meet the policy team objective of generating useful comments from existing communities.

I think we met our basic digital diplomacy aim too - the useful application of techniques and tools to help meet policy objectives. And the only cost was a little bit of a lot of peoples time, from people who led on policy (Emma, Andy and Michael), online news (Claire), content (Alison), user interface (Rob), development (Colin), comments (Shane) press (Lucy), Red Cross online (Alex) and Red Cross press (Mark).

Screenshot from the Joint Foreign Office and Red Cross website 

Posted at 14:41 02 October 2009 by Stephen Hale  |  Comments[1]

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Comments:

Well done for an interesting initiative, which I somehow missed first time around. However, the engagement in this case is in some senses pointing in the wrong direction. It is not members of the public, nor indeed British troops who need to see this, but political figures who run ministries and the government. For example, the US Army has traditionally provided a lot of training on the Conventions to troops, but in the Iraq war it was regarded as politically acceptable to shoot at journalists Al-Jazeera was targeted several times, in addition to Terry Lloyd's tragic killing and also to deny the rights afforded by the Conventions to detainees. These were not spontaneous violations by uninformed troops, but rather mandated or facilitated from the top. This is the nature of the war the UK government must share responsibility for. Similarly, although the recommendations in the action plan for early warning sound nice, in reality the UK and US governments take a politically expedient view on the question of recognising and responding to genocide. In Bosnia, for example, evidence of the camps and the killings there was in UK government hands as early as July 1992, but their considered view was that Serb nationalist forces would 'win' the war that summer, so they chose not to act. At the time, the US government also refused to use the 'G' word, prompting resignations from the State Department. And then later, when it came to punishing those crimes, let's just say that there was an element of politics there too that prevented the capture of Karadzic for a few years. Do you have any plans to do engagement inside government on this, perhaps to prevent a future Blair-type figure from rushing us into a dirty war, or at least making them think that they may face scrutiny or investigation if they do? Anything that increases awareness of IHL is most welcome, so congrats once again on making this part of your engagement work.

Posted by Lee Bryant on October 02, 2009 at 04:13 PM BST #

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