On Nov. 11 the groups reconvened after a breakout session to present their ideas for public diplomacy initiatives (mostly with a social media angle).

Group 1 presented an extensive list of suggestions:
1.) A series of video shorts called “My America is” or have a touring film festival about “my America is”. This can include particular ethnic groups and immigrants talking about their experiences.
2.) Encourage local community voting to select local development projects, whether it’s a public art center or sports center. This will give local development projects more of a feeling of local buy-in, rather than Americans coming in to push something on the local community.
3.) Foster a crowd sourced wiki of Muslim media. Relatedly, have a university-based media hub to gather media being produced by various entities and help that media become more well-known.
4.) Engage U.S. publishers. For some of these public diplomacy projects, alongside individual private-sector efforts, there needs to be some type of large-scale coordination.
5.) National Endowment for the Arts freedom fund to foster the publication, translation, and multi-platforming of media (like making audio books out of print books).
6.) Add a sentence to US passports: “Remember that when you are overseas you are an ambassador of America.”
7.) Facilitate more fruitful communication by celebrities with foreign audiences, to prevent unintended consequences.
8.) Provide free luggage carts at U.S. airports.
9.) A sister cities project for public libraries.
10.) A travel TV show that would focus on preparing Americans to be more culturally and politically astute when they are abroad.
11.) Improve the no fly list process. It’s having a negative impact on our ability as Americans to interact with foreigners.
12.) Build synergies through collaboration. If individuals are more aware of what others are doing in a particular region, there could be more idea-sharing.
13.) A giveaway or reduce the cost of pre-loaded eBooks (a kindle-type thing)
14.) Giveaway of pocket video cameras to kids in key areas to provide them a chance to show what the world looks like to them.
15.) Pen pals – e-mail has changed the importance of postal letters, but encourage some kind of one-to-one relationship with kids across cultures.

Group 2 presented one well-fleshed out idea:
Create a worldwide music contest that uses new media, bringing the drama of an American Idol or Project Runway to the rest of the world and bring in the ideas of voting, a community, and self-expression to a community of people not as well-connected to these ideas as we would like them to be.
– They assume the ubiquity of cell phones, so they propose allowing input from individuals via cell phone – it could be composing music, commenting or voting.
– The act of participating would lead to the implied message that participation, choice and voting is an expression of freedom.
– By using mobile phones people can be as public or private as they want in their participation.
–There could be national or regional as well as worldwide winners.
– Have a theme on which the participants could base their entries – such as “hope” or “peace”
– Take a song that already exists and have participants interpret the song the way they want to interpret it.
– Can create an online archive about the songs and winners.
– Let the winners come to the United States for a music internship.
– Get iTunes to highlight a song – which can allow musicians in developing countries to have access to the U.S. market. People could vote by downloading the song, thus paying the artist.
– Tap the potential of private sponsorship. Since sending texts costs money, companies could sponsor contest entries by allowing people 100 or 200 chances to participate in voting.

Group 3 had a wide range of suggestions:
– Get a clear understanding across the U.S. government of what is already happening in iDiplomacy and what our capabilities are.
– Leverage existing technologies that make transliteration possible in real time. That helps to get past the final three-foot language communication barrier when two people don’t speak the same language.
– Have a Muslim women’s series promoting moderate voices. This can happen in societies where their voices are among the mainstream as well as more radicalized environments.
– Build on existing brands, such as G.I. Joe or Transformers to get fathers to expose their sons to the action figures, etc., that they thought were cool growing up.
– Have a Peace Corps 2, where producers help local populations understand what resources are available to them.
– Aggregate government features, capabilities, content and assets, so they can be harnessed, channeled and made more available to local communities.
– Buy up media to protect it from censorship. (Saudis are buying moderate content for the purpose of keeping it from the public because they thought it was too racy.)
– Empower women in societies where their voices are not often heard to socialize and collaborate with each other online.
– Use the microloan approach to encourage women and business in emerging economies.
– Create a national ID program, where the ID will let you get government benefits.

Group 4 focused on motivating people to engage in person-to-person exchanges – and the idea of an “iDiplomat”: ordinary U.S. citizens and those in commercial enterprise participating in public diplomacy.

– They concluded there were three groups of people with different levels of potential for participating in public diplomacy. The first group included people already doing things in public diplomacy.
– The second group included those willing to support public diplomacy, who would be best helped by training and tools to participate (such as Web sites, video kiosks and other facilities).
– The third “unmotivated” group consists of people who don’t think they are capable of participating, don’t understand the needs or don’t care. They would focus on forming connections for these people using social networking or a “Rock the Vote” model.
– Involving youth is key – they are sophisticated in social networking and gaming as early as 5 and 6 years of age, and there’s an opportunity for them to be active listeners.
– One idea was to have an X-prize to revolutionize person-to-person exchanges.
– Have a public-private partnership. Government can fund it and provide gravitas.
– Use the Overseas Private Investment Corporation – allow companies to receive funding in at-risk areas where stability is paramount.
– Involve people with a profit motive. There’s a big shift in the non-profit world toward the “fourth sector” – the idea that you can do something that’s for-profit and improves the world. (An example is the Disney volunteerism project, where if you volunteer in your local community and tell Disney about it ahead of time they send you a free day pass. Disney in turn benefits because participants in the program will buy souvenirs, etc.)