On April 22, in a meeting room located in Baghdad’s Green Zone, Scott Heiferman, chief executive of Meetup.com, and Jason Liebman, chief executive of how-to video site Howcast, sat down with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih for some coffee. It was one of their last meetings as part of a delegation of Silicon Valley and New York–based technology executives—including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Blue State Digital’s David Nassar, WordPress’s Raanan Bar-Cohen and representatives from YouTube, Google and AT&T—who were sent to the country by the U.S. State Department to survey the state of technology in Iraq and to help formulate ideas on how to build its infrastructure from scratch.
During the four-day trip, the executives met with, among other officials, General Nasier Abadi, Iraqi Armed Forces’ vice chief of staff; Marc Wall, coordinator for economic transition in Iraq; and Ralph Steen, officer in charge of the national fiber network installation project. Outside of the Green Zone, they wore military helmets and flak jackets and met local Iraqi leaders. They sat at roundtables with elite students from the University of Technology and the University of Baghdad to discuss how they use Facebook and which videos they like on YouTube. After coffee and tea with the deputy prime minister, Twitter’s Mr. Dorsey convinced him to start his own account on the microblogging platform. He could use his iPhone to update the page.
“The goal was really to listen and see if there was a way we could help, go there and come up with a list of things that we could do in a matter of weeks, not years,” Mr. Liebman, the Howcast executive, told The Observer in a phone interview after his return to New York.
The delegation confronted a myriad of connectivity problems in Iraq. Power grids are on the fritz. Only about 5 percent of homes have Internet access, according to the group, and although an estimated 80 percent of the population own mobile phones, infrastructure is crippling under the demand.
“We were on the phone with the deputy prime minister before we met him and the phone [call] dropped five, six times,” Mr. Liebman said.
The group was escorted by a security team, and “always felt safe,” according to Mr. Liebman, but with suicide bombings a not-infrequent occurrence, everyday safety is a constant concern for Iraqi citizens; reliable phone and Internet connections are vital to their daily lives.
Mr. Heiferman returned to his Meetup office last week to a sign hanging in his office that his coworkers made. It read: “Mission Accomplished.” But there is still lots of work to do.
“They’ve got real issues,” Mr. Heiferman said about Iraq. “Some say, ‘How do you think about Internet infrastructure when you need a sanitation infrastructure? How can you think about Internet connectivity when there isn’t clean
The delegation—the first of its kind—was organized by Jared Cohen, the 27-year-old Stanford graduate who became the youngest member of the State Department’s policy planning staff in 2006. “We all know the story of challenges in Iraq,” Mr. Cohen explained during a digital video conference with State Department reporters last Wednesday. “We’ve been hearing that story for a while. But increasingly, we’ve been hearing stories and reporting from our embassy and elsewhere about opportunities, in particular with regard to technology. So we had been exploring ways that we can embrace those trends and leverage those trends to try to look for new opportunities to use technology to support our objectives in Iraq.”
During the trip, the group used a Twitter hashtag (#iraqtech) and worked on a sharable document (using Google Docs, of course), according to Mr. Liebman, to chronicle the ways in which they may be able to help—from training government officials on using online tools to foster transparency to teaching students how to use Twitter.
On April 21, the group got a tour of the Iraq National Museum, which recently reopened and has become an important symbol for both government and citizens for their history and culture. They met with Faeza Al Ubadi, the museum’s chief engineer, who is trying to build a Web site for the institution. “He was talking about things like Norton AntiVirus and all these things just to get email up, and we were like, ‘O.K., you can use Google Apps. It’s free, it takes two seconds, you don’t need to build your whole email server, right?” Mr. Liebman said. They plan on helping Mr. Al Ubadi build a robust Web site for the museum. One of their goals is to educate Iraqis on the free platforms, from Google to YouTube, that are already available to them.
The group also hopes to organize a delegation of Iraqi government officials and community leaders for a visit to Silicon Valley, and possibly New York’s tech community. They are also brainstorming ideas for an online, centralized information portal for Iraqi citizens, according to Mr. Liebman. “We’ll have more announcements in a few months,” he said.
“Someone on my team, at Meetup, they were kind of skeptical of the trip,” Mr. Heiferman told the Observer. “And they said, ‘Wow, so this is just America doing some sort of cultural imperialism on this country.’
