Meet Radio Free Europe's Tech Justice League

The United States government has quietly gathered a collection of tech and media superstars to advise on propaganda and public diplomacy. Just think of the new Broadcasting Board of Governors' Commission on Innovation as the Justice League of Public Diplomacy--the commission's unpaid members include Twitter and Facebook's cofounders, Steve Jobs's biographer, media and foreign policy gurus, and high-ranking muckety-mucks from all aspects of cultural life.

Members of the commission met at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Washington (DC) bureau on February 10 to discuss how changes in digital media may create new audiences in “specific markets.” So who is on the board, exactly? Attendees at the February meeting included Walter Isaacson (himself a former chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors), foreign policy expert Anne-Marie Slaughter, RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser, Twitter cofounder Evan Williams, Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, media expert and Twitter standby Clay Shirky, Hari Sreenivasan of PBS Newshour, and officials from Google Ideas, TED, the Knight Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. State Department, ONE, the Mozilla Foundation, the Personal Democracy Forum, New York's Museum of Modern Art, and Civic Commons.