Tech@State Hosts Moneyball Diplomacy Event

On June 7, 2013, the Office of eDiplomacy within the State Department's Bureau of Information Resource Management hosted its 11th Tech@State conference, Tech@State: Moneyball Diplomacy, to explore their intersection of four disparate fields: economics, technology, diplomacy, and baseball. The event, held on the campus of George Washington University, examined the increasingly large role of economic issues and data analysis in foreign policy formulation and implementation. Over 30 experts from within the U.S. government, international non-governmental organizations, policy institutes, technology companies, and academic institutions convened to engage an audience of 300 attendees, as well as hundreds more U.S. and foreign participants watching online from several U.S. embassies overseas. 

In a welcoming address, Richard Boly, Director of the Office of eDiplomacy, explained the connection between “moneyball” and foreign policy. In the same way that the underfunded Oakland Athletics baseball team found success and talent utilizing unconventional analytical methods, so too could the government profit from finding “existing erroneous assumptions that underlie some of our premises of diplomacy.”

Kenneth Cukier, the Data Editor of The Economist, gave the keynote address, which…