Woodrow Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter inaugurated PolicyNet’s new Virtual Seminar series with a talk about “networking as the best form of global governance.”  Students and faculty from five other PolicyNet schools participated via videoconference and video webcast. 

Participating in the virtual seminar via videoconference links were:  Tsinghua University in Beijing, the Crawford School of Economics and Government at the Australian National University in Canberra, the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, and Waterloo and Wilfred Laurier universities in Canada.  These institutions are all part of PolicyNet, an online public policy network established two years ago by the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), in partnership with the Woodrow Wilson School.

"Fielding questions about globalization from students halfway around the world brought a truly global perspective to the discussion, said Dean Slaughter, who led off the seminar with a review of her recent writings on transnational networks, as well as challenges to American foreign policy in the 21st century. “Virtual seminars are an excellent example of the kind of networking that PolicyNet was set up to facilitate.”

The proceedings of the seminar were blogged on PolicyNet. The video recording of the seminar is available through the World Bank’s Global Development Learning Network (GDLN) videoconference site (search for “Policy Net”).  PolicyNet also offers participants a forum thread where the discussion can continue online.