Intranet Lessons from the US State Department

Tuesday May 15, 2012Richard C. Boly, Director, U.S. Department of State Office of eDiplomacyVenue: Constant Contact, 1601 Trapelo Rd, Waltham, MA 02451

Abstract

Rapid innovation and myriad competing offerings make us feel so powerful as consumers and activists on the internet, but we go to work and feel so lame with the tools and platforms available behind the firewall.  Unless large organizations address this growing usability gap, their kludge offerings will come to be seen as a “hostile work environments” by digital natives and a competitive disadvantage in attracting and retaining talent.  The State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy has developed a series of knowledge leadership platforms using open source software that borrow from the social web.  Richard will provide a non-theoretical, practitioner’s view on the challenges and opportunities for bringing the experience of the web to software platforms in the oldest U.S. federal cabinet-level agency.

Bio

Richard Boly is a career U.S. diplomat and currently the Director of the Office of eDiplomacy, an applied technology think tank for the U.S. Department of State. Previously, he was a National Security Affairs Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, where he launched the Global Entrepreneurship Program. He recently served in the U.S. Embassy of Rome, where he developed and ran a program to promote entrepreneurship in Italy. Continuing with his close ties to Italy, Richard serves on the board of the Mind the Bridge Foundation, which connects the innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems in Italy and Silicon Valley. Other embassy assignments have included the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Paraguay. Richard is the most junior diplomat to win the Cobb Award for commercial diplomacy.

In a prior life, Richard was the first Presidential Management Fellow with the Inter-American Foundation, was a consultant with the Inter-American Development Bank, and founded and ran a shrimp hatchery in coastal Ecuador. In a stint with the Silicon Valley iconic PR firm, Regis McKenna, he helped launch the first Apple Macintosh. Richard is a graduate of Stanford University and the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at UCSD, where he was selected as 2011 Co-Outstanding Alumni Award Winner.

Evening Schedule

If you can provide a ride, or if you need one, check out GoLoco, a free ride-sharing connector service: http://goloco.org/groups/5716.