REUNION 2000 - OTTAWA

REUNION 2000 - OTTAWA

Friday evening reception at the Hellenic Banquet Centre, 1315 Prince of Wales Drive, Ottawa. Greeting desk for Registered Participants and opportunity to socialize with your old friends and colleagues. Time: 7:00 PM until 11:00 PM. Cash bar in the foyer. Greeting desk and some nibbles in the main room during the evening. No smoking in the main room, but smokers can indulge in the bar area.

Saturday Morning Golf Play to be at The Dome golf course. Information will be distributed Friday evening.

Saturday Evening Dinner & Dance at the Hellenic Banquet Centre, 1315 Prince of Wales Drive, Ottawa
 6:30 PM   Start of Evening, Greeting desk for Registered Participants who missed the Friday.
 7:30 PM   Buffet Dinner in the Main Hall
 8:45 PM   Presenation and Toasts
 9:15 PM   Entertainment
10:00 PM   Dance 
 1:00 AM   Bar closes and Reunion ends.
Cash bar in the foyer. No Smoking in the Main Hall.

Deadlines/Refunds: All deadlines have expired. No refunds can be issued.

Click on the map for more detail.   

Date: 15 Mar 99 12:00:04 PST

The following is from the Daily Telegraph

* * * * *

E-mail puts diplomatic relations on fast track

By Jon Hibbs, Political Correspondent

A RISING generation of Young Turks among Britain's diplomats is harnessing the power of e-mail to bring about a democratic revolution in the fusty corridors of the Foreign Office.

To the consternation of traditionalist mandarins, electronic messages are whizzing between Whitehall and British embassies around the world, telling diplomats how to spice up the service for the Millennium.

Ministers have hailed the unexpected benefits of new technology, which has speeded up internal channels of communication, broadened the development of policy, and produced a rash of new ideas for reforming the bureaucracy.

"We have suddenly jumped a century from the 19th to the 21st," said Derek Fatchett, the minister in charge of modernising the Foreign Office, in an interview with The Telegraph. "Instead of the old-fashioned telegrams, e-mail is enabling us to pass information more quickly and securely, reducing the amount of paperwork and making us all more efficient."

The transformation followed the decision last year by Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, to replace the historic Foreign Office telegraph network with £69 million worth of software.

Engineers will shortly complete the installation of 4,400 personal computers in the 250 British overseas posts, linking them all up to 1,200 domestic users on the Firecrest system.

A small band of high-flying young officials who had been asked to come up with ideas for modernising the Foreign Office seized on the development to set up an e-mail forum among staff. A report on their findings is being compiled, but one proposal that has already won favour is to bypass the traditional Whitehall paper trail and allow relatively junior ranks to make representations direct to ministers.

Under previous procedures, submissions were passed upwards through a rigid chain of command, gradually being filtered and refined until they reached the red box of the Foreign Secretary.

In this new culture of openness, however, relatively youthful officials can now put their arguments right to the top, effectively flattening the old career structure. "One of the criticisms of this place was that you got a hierarchy, and we did not always tap the full talents of young people," said Mr Fatchett.

The response to all the e-mail activity from many senior officers is that it's sad this did not happen 20 years ago."

Mr Fatchett said the home-grown experiment had improved morale and justified a decision not to bring in external management consultants, even if some were anxious about the consequences. "People are not at this stage feeling threatened, and if we try out these new ideas on an ad hoc basis they should have the great advantage of not deliberately alienating individuals," he said.

However Mr Fatchett disclosed that the changes had not been completely hitch-free, as when recently there was a massive computer failure in the embassy at Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. "The best brains of the Foreign Office were put in to tackle it and could not get the system to work. It turned out that rats had gnawed through the wiring," he said.

           

Following is from the Sunday Times, August 16th:

Foreign Office to pull plug
       on telegrams...stop

by Michael Prescott
Chief Political Correspondent

AFTER almost 150 years of carrying news of war, famine, plague and assassination, the Foreign Office telegram is about to be consigned to the wastepaper bin of history.

Robin Cook, the foreign secretary, has ordered an overhaul that will enable officials at Britain's 221 diplomatic posts to communicate with London and one another by secure e-mail rather than via the antiquated telegram system.

In all but the most urgent cases, the present system - only partly modified since it was installed in 1852 - requires ambassadors to join a 24-hour queue before their missives can be sent to the Foreign Office in King Charles Street, off Whitehall.

This means Cook is often asked to read confidential briefing notes more out of date than the foreign pages of London's morning newspapers. Things have, in essence, changed little since June 1914 when a telegram dictated by Consul Jones on the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo took 3 1/2 hours to reach London.

The change has been brought about following the arms-to-Africa affair, which prompted allegations of Foreign Office involvement in sanctions-busting and arms-running to Sierra Leone. Ministers and officials were exonerated, but their communications network was criticised.

As a result, Cook has pledged to do away with the telegram by 2000. In its place will come an e-mail system of the type already used by the United States. Each diplomat and official will have access to a PC, communication will be instantaneous and ambassadors will be able to send briefing material direct to each other. The change will also save money by doing away with "Comcen", the 24-hour communication centre in the bowels of the Foreign Office, where dozens of people read telegrams as they arrive on screens connected to the telegram equipment. The Foreign Office received 2.3m telegrams last year.

Messages are forwarded by Comcen to their intended recipients, either inside the Foreign Office or at British embassies and consulates around the world. Within the Foreign Office, the telegrams are circulated either on-screen or by printing out material and having it taken to the minister or official concerned.

Updating the system will be a relief for ambassadors. At present each embassy has one short period of time every day when it can dispatch its messages to London, although it can jump the queue to send urgent material.

"I hope with the changes I propose, to be ahead of the foreign editors, not behind them," Cook said yesterday.

He conceded, however, that doing away with the telegram and replacing it with what will be known as the "e-gram" means the beginning of a less romantic age. The Foreign Office archive is full of telegrams that amount to reports from the front line of history.

Taken together, they tell the story of this century, replete with messages such as that sent from Britain's consul in Sarajevo to Sir Edward Grey, then foreign secretary, in the summer of 1914.

"According to news received here," it says, "heir apparent and his consort assassinated this morning by means of an explosive nature."

The telegram reporting the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and heralding the outbreak of the first world war was sent at 12.30pm and arrived in London at 4pm.

Dispatches from Nazi Germany in the 1930s paint a picture of growing anti-semitism and aggression. Shortly after the second world war, Winston Churchill made his 1946 speech accusing Russia of imposing an "iron curtain" between its satellites and the rest of Europe. Stalin compared the speech to one of Hitler's, notes the March 1946 telegram from our man in Moscow, adding that the comparison is "so far-fetched and puerile it can hardly earn a respectful hearing from any but the most convinced fellow-travellers".

Among the shortest and most touching of the archive telegrams is that sent to Jackie Kennedy in Washington by Harold Macmillan. Her husband, Macmillan's friend, had just been shot dead.

"We are numbed by the shock of Jack's death," it says. "Nothing we say can console you. All we can do is to send you our best love. Signed Harold and Dorothy Macmillan."

    REUNION 98

A temporary problem exists with the e-mail addresses at CFSE on the WEB page for Reunion 98. Everything for the reunion is still go, and if you are interested in registering or require more information, please e-mail E. Acker and he can assist you in contacting the organizers!

Hotels and Tourism Kingston

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From the International Herald Tribune May 7th:

Strike puts a gag on French diplomacy...

Paris-French diplomacy was tongue-tied Tuesday with its encoders, responsible for sending sensitive information between embassies and government ministries, on strike. "Communication has been slowed down," said Jacques Rummelhardt, the Foreign Affairs spokesman. But he added that there was "no threat to communications security." The encoders, who went on strike Monday for three days, are protesting the changing status of their work brought about by the increasing use of sophisticated electronic communications. "The work used to be as you imagine it to be in a John Le Carre novel," Mr. Rummelhardt said. "These days there are computers and the Internet." There are 270 encoders involved in the strike in France and in French embassies around the world. The strike was blocking telegrams between Paris and its embassies, according to a group of strikers outside the Foreign Ministry.

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