Oooh… aaah… bow your heads in reverence before the Foreign Office’s brand new website. Especially nice: this Google maps mashup showing FCO activities around the world (with map pins colour-coded according to the relevant FCO Strategic Priority, if you please).
All the same, lovely as the new site looks, it could still do with being a lot more interactive. Sure, we can leave comments on the blogs (although I can’t help but laugh at the description box on the blogging home page, which says
This blog space provides a place for Ministers and officials to engage in a dialogue with you about international affairs and the work of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Reword it in your head as “this blog space provides a place for you to engage in a dialogue with Ministers and officials”, and it somehow sounds entirely different, in a good way…)
But rather than limiting public comments to the blogs (which in any case don’t remotely cover the whole FCO waterfront: they’re fine if you want to talk Kosovo or Lebanon, but there’s nowhere obvious for climate change or UN reform), why not go the whole hog and allow us to comment on every page – and have officials engage in the discussion?
That would be public diplomacy.
