The coolest heads of state on Twitter
Anything becomes possible when everything breaks down. Perhaps this is why two of the most innovative heads of state on the planet of from places where dysfunction has reached a peak in the past.
The two gentlemen pictured above are Laurent Lamothe, prime minister of Haiti (left) and Toomas Ilves, president of Estonia (right). I constantly know what both of these men are doing for their countries because they are actual, sincere users of social media. They do not employ "Twitter monkeys," as the term in Washington now goes – they are interacting with the world directly via the Internet. As a result, I know more about the strategic direction of Haiti and Estonia than I do in Missouri, where I currently reside.
I know that in Haiti, they just started an agricultural infrastructure project for 7000 hectares of rice. I know that Lamothe is working constantly on anti-corruption initiatives, and that recent partnerships with the US Embassy are working on improving housing availability to Haiti's poorest.
As for Estonia, Toomas Ilves is constantly tweeting about the state of the nation, especially its world-class innovations are e-government initiatives and business start-ups in a variety of sectors, especially technology. (Estonia is the home of Skype, in case you didn't know.) Also, Ilves is not afraid to start up trouble in Twitter in the most awesome of ways. He has taken to the social network to pimphand Paul Krugman for saying that Estonia's austerity-driven recovery isn't a real recovery. And when my colleague from the Washington Post Max Fisher made a crack on Twitter about politicians over 50 talking about technology, Ilves immediately (within a few seconds!) reminded Fisher that he started programming computers in his teens. This prompted me to ask @IlvesToomas, "How do you say AW SNAP in Estonian?" and he instantly informed me that it would be "oo snäpp."
These are some awesome heads of state, my friends.
I can tell you, there's nothing like that kind of interaction here in St Louis, where the most common way for politicians to communicate is through idiotic focus-grouped television ads. And the paleo-media, such as newspapers? Forget it. Seventy percent of the OpEds in the St Louis Post-Dispatch are about SPORTS, which is why I have more info about Haiti than I do my neighborhood.
THE CRUCIBLE OF INNOVATION IS DYSFUNCTION
One of the reasons that Estonia and Haiti have such flexible political cultures right now is because up until recently, things haven't worked at all. Estonia is much further down the path of development than Haiti, for a myriad of reasons. But twenty years ago, when the country emerged from decades of brutal Soviet occupation, very little of the business and government bureaucracy functioned. As it so happens, I have personal friends from Estonia who tell me that in the 1990s, one of the reasons Estonia was able to innovate government services is that everything so so utterly corrupt, they had to basically start over. And in that environment, a decade or two later, you have Government ID cards with which you can actually sign contracts digitally, and an environment for business innovation that is one of the best in the world.
Haiti is of course a more serious matter. The tragic earthquake was, in the words of one of my Haitian friends, "A tragedy happening on top of a tragedy." It laid a country known for desperation to an even lower level of poverty and corruption. And, both ironically and hopefully, that is the environment in which politicians like Mr. Lamothe are moving the country forward. Because everything in Haiti had become so broken, the only thing left has been to try the new, the unusual, and the untested.
These are amazing stories of innovative governance, and I doubt they are the only ones in the world. However, they are made possible by politicians such as Lamothe and Ilves embracing a new type of political communication: being open, honest and transparent.
Isn't that what we were hoping for all along?
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RESEAU CITADELLE : LE COURAGE DE COMBATTRE LES DEMAGOGUES DE DROITE ET DE GAUCHE , LE COURAGE DE DIRE LAVERITE!!!
"You can fool some people sometimes, (
But you can't fool all the people all the time."
Vous pouvez tromper quelques personnes, parfois,
Mais vous ne pouvez pas tromper tout le monde tout le temps.
) dixit Abraham Lincoln.
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