Alec Ross, senior adviser on innovation at the State Department, was interviewed on the Kojo Nnamdi Show for Tech Tuesday on Sept. 22.

You can listen to the nearly hour long interview in its entirety here, but there were some particularly interesting points Ross made worth highlighting.

Ross recently returned from a week in the Congo, where he discussed three problems that didn’t at first seem to be related to technology:

1.        Soldiers not getting paid. Soldiers weren’t getting paid because they literally had to put money on a truck and drive it to wherever they were. Their solution is to switch to mobile banking, which allows the government to pay soldiers through their cell phones.

2.        Rogue militias in the bush. They met with ex-combatants who said that the main mode of communication was the radio, and that if they spoke on the radio to their peers about demobilizing they would be viewed with less skepticism than someone from the government.

3.        Women and violence. UN peacekeepers do a good job of tracking the perpetrators, but the information is not being shared with people engaging directly with the women. They’re going to put in a system of interoperable communications so they can share that information in real time with NGOs, refugee camp administrators and hospitals.

They are also trying to use cell phone technology to help in sub-Saharan Africa. In one region in Uganda that has a high HIV infection level there is only one doctor per 10,000. To keep people on track with their antiviral medicines they will receive text messages telling them which drugs to take and when to take them.

Ross also made the point a couple of times that America’s preferred technology isn’t necessarily the best fit for the rest of the world:

“I think a lot of the time Americans take a somewhat paternalistic view towards technology in the developing world. We say, ‘Oh we’re so wise, you know. We’re Americans – we’re the most developed country on the earth and we are going to bestow on thee, the poor suffering people of the developing world, the blessings of technology.’ And you know what? They’re running way ahead of us. We don’t have mobile banking in the United States but there was $3 billion worth of mobile banking transactions in Kenya last year.”

Also:

“I’m always asked questions about YouTube, about Twitter, about Facebook, and that’s because those are our American points of reference. And they’re strong companies with global presences but one of the things that we’re really focusing on is with our embassies it’s, okay, get to understand what the social media sites are, what the – what the usage patterns are, what the main websites are in the country where you’re stationed. Because sometimes Facebook might be teeny tiny, sometimes Twitter might not exist and it would be something we’ve never heard of in the United States. . . . If you’re going to be in Brazil and you’re going to perform public diplomacy you better be on Orkut, forget about Facebook.”

Ross said that the State Department is trying to “reassert the primacy of diplomacy” over force in international relations, or in shorthand, “butter before guns”:
“I also think that if we look backwards on the last eight years I think it’s reasonable to say that the State Department played a role that often times felt like it felt like it was second tier to the Defense Department. And so I think that people at the State Department are ready to sort of reassert themselves and reassert the primacy of diplomacy so that when the United States engages abroad it isn’t always at the barrel of a gun and but we use diplomacy and we use development at least in equal measure to defense.”

The State Department has its own internal version of Wikipedia, Diplopedia. It lets any of the 62,000 employees edit and add information – especially useful since Foreign Service officers change posts every few years and a number of State employees are political appointees who might otherwise not pass on their knowledge to their successors.