Julian Dierkes (@jdierkes) is an associate professor and the Keidanren Chair in Japanese Research at UBC’s Institute of Asian Research. He teaches “Communicating Policy” in UBC’s Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs.
Trained as a sociologist (BA UC Berkeley, PhD Princeton), Julian has been at UBC since 2002. His research has focused on the contemporary education system of Japan and on mining policy and political development in Japan. His focus on Japan and Mongolia led him to an interest in bilateral relations and thus diplomacy.
Julian has also long been interested in the use of digital tools for academic communication. In graduate school he created the first department webpage in the social sciences for his department and was engaged in various online cataloguing efforts. He was involved in the creation of UBC’s Asia Pacific Memo an effort to create and establish new means of communicating the results of academic research on Asia to a broader interested public. He has bogged about supplementary education in Japan and continues to blog very regularly about contemporary developments in Mongolia.
His interest in bilateral relations coupled with his curiosity about things digital ultimately brought him to the topic of digital and direct diplomacy. Julian is generally prejudiced against the use of social media as a “mere” broadcast tool and sees social media-mediated engagement leading to better diplomatic policy.
Other members of the Direct Diplomacy project:
Ben Rowswell (@benrowsell) is a Fellow of the Montreal Institute for International Studies (CERIUM), and Canada’s Ambassador to Venezuela since March 2014. He has been a Canadian diplomat since 1993, serving as Representative of Canada in Kandahar (2009-10), Deputy Head of Mission in Kabul (2008-09), Chargé d’Affaires in Baghdad (2003-05), in the Canadian Embassy to Egypt (1996-98) and in the Canadian Permanent Mission to the United Nations (1994).
During a sabbatical year in the Liberation Technology Program at Stanford University from 2010-11, Ben began exploring opportunities for improving the practice of diplomacy through digital tools. Notable among his efforts since then have been a research project in Egypt called Cloud to Street in collaboration with Farhaan Ladhani and Shuv Majumdar, an Innovation Lounge within Canada’s foreign ministry to incubate innovative approaches to diplomacy, and a collaboration with the Munk School at the University of Toronto in May 2013 to implement ‘Direct Diplomacy.’
Ben has also served as Pritzker International Fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, as Diplomate Invité at the Université du Québec à Montréal, and as co-editor of Iraq: Preventing a New Generation of Conflict (2007) with David Malone and Markus Bouillon. In 2011 he won the inaugural Palmer Prize for Diplomats awarded by the Community of Democracies.
The ideas expressed in this webpage represent the personal opinions of Ben Rowswell and Matthieu John. They do not reflect the perspectives of the Government of Canada.
Matthieu John (@MatthieuJohn) is a candidate for the Master’s in Public and International Affairs in the Departement of Political Sciences at the University of Montréal (UdeM). He has graduated from HEC Montreal where he completed a BBA with specialization courses in management and political science.
He is currently a research assistant at the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales de l’Université de Montréal (CÉRIUM).
His academic and professional interests includes, among other things, international relations and diplomacy, cultural and religious minorities, the role and actions of NGOs in our societies. Traveling regularly to Asia and learning Hindi, he is particularly interested in the Indian subcontinent.
From 2011 to 2013, he was team manager and then head of HumaniTerre, a Montreal association that promotes sustainable development in international affairs. Following various experiences in civil society organizations, including one at the delegation of Caritas Internationalis to the UN, he carried out a research project on Dalit women in South India, in colaboration with Social Watch – Tamil Nadu and Caritas India. He is now volunteer at Caritas India. Presently, as part of Direct Diplomacy project, Matthieu focuses its research on digital diplomacy and crowdfunding campaigns.
Thibaut Temmerman (@Titem) is a candidate for the Master’s in Public and International Affairs in the Departement of Political Sciences at the University of Montréal (UdeM).
He has graduated from the Institut d’Études Politiques de Rennes (France) and completed there a Master’s degree in European Affairs.
His academic and professional interests includes among other things governance and empowerment, international relations and human rights as well as all that can play a part in improving our lives in this 21st century full of challenges.
He previously worked as a press and radio journalist for different media. Last year he notably produced and hosted “Le monde en partage”, a weekly radio program on international news, broadcasted on Radio Centre-Ville. During his 2008 internship as an analyst in the economic service of the French embassy in Cyprus, he co-wrote a guidebook aiming at entrepreneurs and investors, published by Ubifrance.
As a board member of the Rennes section of the Young European Federalist, he organized and animated several lectures and debates with politicians, scholars and citizens with the goal of catching up with the European political construction. A volunteer for Vues & Voix, he also records audio books for individuals with perceptual disabilities.
Also members of CAPSTONE project:
*All students below were candidates for the Master of Global Affairs Program at the University of Toronto, 2015 during CAPSTONE project.
Amanda Coletta (@a_coletta) completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto, graduating with High Distinction in History and Italian. While her research interests are wide-ranging , she recently completed her graduate thesis on the institutional security legacies of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. An avid sports fan, she often has difficulty reconciling her excitement for sport mega-events with the awful hangovers that linger in host cities and countries.
Last summer, Amanda interned in the Foreign Policy and Diplomacy section of the Canadian High Commission in the United Kingdom. There, she learned to what extent diplomatic outposts could employ digital tools to raise their public profile and assisted in the organization of a number of high-profile visits, including that of the Canadian Prime Minister for the NATO summit in Wales. Currently, she is an Executive Producer of Global Conversations at the Munk School.
Nick Dagostino’s (@nick_dagostino) academic and professional focus combines Internet governance, global finance, 
and social movements. Prior to Munk, Nick graduated from King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario with a degree in political science, and worked as a schoolteacher in South Korea. His professional experience began when working for the consumer-electronics buying department of an multinational corporation.
In 2014, Nick interned at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland. Coordinating with global Internet stakeholders, he helped organize the 9th annual IGF meeting in Istanbul. Nick was later accepted as a NextGen fellow for ICANN’s 51st global meeting, presenting to ICANN executives on public diplomacy. Previously, Nick’s academic interest in social movements brought him to South America. While living and working within indigenous communities in the northern Ecuadorean Andes, Nick studied the complexities of indigenous political mobilization. The combination of collective mobilization and digital policies led Nick to begin research on digital diplomacy for the Munk School.
Viktoria Lovric’s (@ToriLovrics) professional and personal interests include humanitarian affairs, the role that technology can play in humanitarian response as well as digital diplomacy more broadly. Acting as an Advocacy and Communications Intern at Action Contre la Faim (ACF) Canada, she is also currently developing a communications strategy that seeks to promote the organization while simultaneously engaging with the Canadian humanitarian community on upcoming events.
Viktoria received a Bachelor of Arts from Dalhousie University with a combined honours in International Development Studies and History. In her undergraduate thesis, Viktoria was able to begin to examine the efficacy of social media. As such, Viktoria is elated to have the opportunity to continue this research and delve deeper in analyzing the role that digital tools play in citizen led social movements.
Theo Milosevic (@TheoMilosevic) completed his undergraduate degree in international relations at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and has professional experience in political risk analysis and international project management. He has a broad set of interests that include foreign direct investment, international security, and innovation policy.
Samantha Rudick (@samgoesglobal) is specializing in Global Economy and Markets studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs. Concurrent with her studies, Samantha is acting as an International Consultant for the International Trade Centre working as part of the Trade for Sustainable Development (T4SD) team. She has helped develop a new online platform that allows producer groups to find resources, ask questions, and connect with others in the sustainability and international trading community (www.sustainabilityxchange.info). Her position has also allowed her to aid with publications on sustainability reporting and developing sustainable supply chains.
Samantha has an honours BA from McGill University in International Development Studies, where she was able to focus on ground level development initiatives. She is a fair trade advocate and has worked with many fair trade organizations from retail to citywide initiatives. She was part of the Fair Trade Toronto team that gained Fair Trade Town designation for Toronto in 2013, currently the largest Fair Trade Town in North America, acting as a Communications Advisor.
Sam Wollenberg (@SamWollenberg) has professional interests in the creation of public and social policy, within the broad fields of international development, human rights and conflict resolution. Specifically speaking, the use of data analytics in drafting more effective policies and development programs, as well as the utilization of online tools to advance democratic rights and freedoms are research areas that Sam is currently interested in.
Additionally, Sam has worked over the past year as a researcher for the Munk School’s digital diplomacy engagement strategies. He hopes that this current research project will greater the understanding and widen the literature on the digital components of movements, and hopefully contribute to more effective and successful social movements in the future.
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