SGS Director Jeremy Weinstein briefs the Hacking for Diplomacy class.
San Francisco Chronicle
In October, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry made a surprise visit to the Hacking for Diplomacy course (pictured below), co-taught by Stanford Global Studies Director Jeremy Weinstein.
In the course, students team-up and tackle actual foreign policy challenges facing the U.S. State Department.
"Brilliant minds are applying techonology to the world's toughest problems," Secretary Kerry wrote on Twitter. "Their perspective will inform our diplomatic engagement moving forward."
According to the course website, 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. Students take on a variety of issues from counterterrorism to space collision avoidance and even refugee flows.
"In some cases, students are going to get very far down the path of working with their colleagues from the inside of government [in] developing a minimal viable product, whether it's some form of technology or social media strategy," Weinstein told the Stanford Daily. "It really could be on the pathway to implementation. I think we saw, in Hacking for Defense, a number of teams that went very far down the path and ultimately were on the receiving end of seed funding from the Department of Defense’s Innovation Unit to take their ideas forward."
The San Francisco Chronicle also highlighted the class this month.
Read more about the course in The Stanford Daily.