What do today’s public diplomacy practitioners talk about?

Joe B. Johnson, Public Diplomacy Council

Many Council members carry on our fascination with public diplomacy [JB emphasis] years after retiring from active duty. Do you ever wonder how different the business is today?

Take a look at our new notes page for Lunch and Learn meetings, sponsored by the Council for PD practitioners. Two Foreign Service Officers, Melissa Quartell and Frankie Sturm, select the topics for these panel discussions with input from others currently working at the State Department on public diplomacy.

They also document every session in a video, or with detailed notes, or both.

For example, January’s discussion “Muddied Waters: Disinformation and Propaganda in the Digital Age” will take you behind the scenes of today’s headlines. Find out:

• How do PD professionals confront trolls, bots and purveyors of falsehoods on the Internet? This is a different challenge from the Soviet disinformation that we veterans dealt with … but not entirely so. 
• What exactly are “bots” anyway? By the way, would you like to have a Twitter conversation with a (benign) bot to test its intelligence? I did; it was fun.

Check out other notes pages, like the one with current State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert and Public Affairs’ Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Susan Stevenson, or delve into career topics like how to move up to deputy chief of mission jobs, or how to write a promotable Employee Evaluation Report. (Kind of important in the Foreign Service’s up-or-out system.)

Ambassador Linda Jewell mentors this program while Melissa, Frankie and our PDC Fellow Alma Burke run the sessions and generate and post the videos and notes. They have produced a remarkable resource: the only one of its kind available to the public, as far as I know.

Joe B. Johnson consults on government communication and technology after a career in the United States Foreign Service. He is an instructor for the National Foreign Affairs Training Center, where he teaches strategic planning for public diplomacy. ...