Hacking for Diplomacy Info Session

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Come join us for dinner and to hear about MS&E 298/IPS 232 - Hacking for Diplomacy. This info session will include an introduction to the class and information about the application process, along with presentations from serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, Zvika Krieger (State Department), Jeremy Weinstein (Political Science Professor), Joe Felter (CISAC Senior Research Scholar), and Steve Weinstein. After the presentation is over, stay to meet other students interested in forming teams. Dinner will be provided.

At a time of significant global uncertainty, diplomats are grappling with transnational and cross-cutting challenges that defy easy solution including: the continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction by states and non-state groups, the outbreak of internal conflict across the Middle East and in parts of Africa, the most significant flow of refugees since World War II, and a changing climate that is beginning to have impacts on both developed and developing countries.

While the traditional tools of statecraft remain relevant, policymakers are looking to harness the power of new technologies to rethink how the U.S. government approaches and responds to these and other long-standing challenges. In this class, student teams will take actual foreign policy challenges and learn how to apply “lean startup” principles, ("mission model canvas," "customer development," and "agile engineering”) to discover and validate agency and user needs and to continually build iterative prototypes to test whether they understood the problem and solution.

​Teams take a hands-on approach requiring close engagement with officials in the U.S. State Department and other civilian agencies.