We are already past the midway mark in our new Hacking for Diplomacy course at Stanford [...] Having logged more than 550 interviews of potential beneficiaries, the teams have delved deep into understanding the problems sourced from the State Department. The challenges are tough - such as how to improve data on refugees who go missing or perish on their journeys, and how to better evaluate the effectiveness of peacekeeping forces. 

Iraq has been a difficult place for U.S. public diplomacy for a very long time now, and yet one would think that a war that the U.S. is fighting on behalf of and in collaboration with the Iraqi government and numerous other international partners, a war that is truly an existential one for Iraqi Shia, would produce at least some dividends in terms of Iraqi goodwill toward the United States. 

This driving energy has taken the group to global venues like Australia's Womad, Lisbon's Music Box, and Malaysia's Rain Forest World Music Festival. It's bringing them to the U.S. for the first time this autumn for a tour as part of Center Stage, the ambitious cultural exchange program initiated by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

They called it Think Again, Turn Away. The concept? Use sarcasm as way to turn Islamic State images into an argument against their grim techniques of terror. The creator and producer? The U.S. State Department. Today, everyone agrees the message was worse than ineffective. It played right into the hands of the terrorists.

Of Brennan’s roughly 200 employees, some 22 are now foreign nationals working here for one-year hitches. [...] Others hail from Turkey, Spain, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Ecuador. They’re here on the Exchange Visitor Program, also called the J-1 visa program, which is administered by the Department of State for foreigners to work or study in the U.S.

Through a State Department-created internship program, students can create data visualizations for embassies around the world or design apps or websites for agencies in a 10-hour-a-week commitment that spans an academic year. This program, called the Virtual Student Foreign Service, is helping to coordinate remote internships for more than 30 agencies this year.