I have started a new project with some friends!

Unaccompanied Baggage will be a collection of commentaries on the Foreign Service experience. It will feature both reblogs of commentaries from other Foreign Service blogs and original content contributed by other writers—some of whom may prefer to remain anonymous.

It all started with a discussion on a Foreign Service blogging group prompted by this post by Email from the Embassy.

We can all understand why Foreign Service Officers need to moderate their online opinions. Under the circumstances, many of them decide that it is simply better not to blog. Others blog, but tread very carefully.

However, many partners of FSOs also feel constraints. Some of the pressure is explicit, from various people in the State Department or at particular posts who either do not understand the concept of a blog, or believe that bloggers cannot be trusted to behave themselves online. Other writers simply feel uncomfortable putting themselves “out there” in a social media culture which has become, like the rest of the internet, pretty unpleasant at times.

But, that doesn’t mean that these employees and their partners don’t have something useful to say! So, if you’d like to watch this story unfold, click on over to Unaccompanied Baggage and subscribe, and/or Like us on Facebook. And let us know if you have something you would like to say!