iDiplomacy will go on spring break for a few weeks but we’ll be back in May.

iDiplomacy will have a lighter publishing schedule this holiday season. But we’ll still be posting links to interesting articles on Twitter (@idiplomacy). Here are a few:

The Turkish Foreign Ministry held its first teleconference Thursday.

Newsweek article on Abu Dhabi’s growing arts scene, including the company Twofour54 — “(named after the emirate’s geographical coordinates) [it's] a ‘content-creation community’ that encompasses a giant high-definition film studio, a state-of-the-art television and radio broadcasting center, a media-training academy, and a division to fund new projects. The goal is to produce high-quality indigenous films, TV shows, news, and even gaming specifically for the Arab world (move over, Mario Kart, here comes Hameed Humvee).”
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I’m in Boston for the Futures of Entertainment Conference at MIT where I will participate in a panel discussion tomorrow about Transmedia for Social Change, moderated by Henry Jenkins, director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program.

The panel will consider the cross-over between the forms of collective activity that mark participation in transmedia narratives and other forms of collective activities that harness entertainment media for social good.  We will also discuss the relationship between the kinds of engagement courted by entertainment franchises and the kind of engagement required for active citizenship.

Some additional bios have been added under “about iDiplomacy.” They include individuals from the entertainment industry, journalism, State Department, a Palestinian refugee and a political theorist. They are: Joseph Assi, Lenny Brown, Bruce Feirstein, Glenn Fogg, Julie Germany, Catherine A. Holland, Mary Lambert, Bill May and Tim White.

The bio for moderator Jerome Gary is available under “conference information.”

Some additional participant bios have been added under “about iDiplomacy.” They include a number of current and former employees of the State Department and defense, security and intelligence agencies. They are: Bert Calland, Emily Goldman, Mark Haselton, Michael A. Lipsner, Duncan MacInnes, Amy Miller Feehery, Pradeep Ramamurthy and Scott Riggs.

You can also see bios for chairman Ben Riley and presenters Rosa Brooks and Warren Wright under “conference information.”

James Fowler, co-author of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, will be one of the presenters at the iDiplomacy symposium. Fowler, a political science professor at UC San Diego, along with co-author Nicholas Christakis, was named “most original thinker of the year” in 2008 on the McLaughlin Group. Their research on social networks was featured in Time’s Year in Medicine in 2007 and 2008 and in Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Ideas. He also was named one of the Nifty Fifty “most inspiring” scientists by the San Diego Science Festival.

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Some additional participants to announce, with bios available under “about iDiplomacy.” The latest round draws from journalism, think tanks, diplomacy, hacking, strategy and design. They are: Matt Armstrong, Justin Carroll, Loren Jenkins, Josh Klein, Arturo Munoz and Leon G. Shahabian.

Check out our new Resources section. It includes includes information for those unfamiliar with public diplomacy as well as those with a working knowledge who want to learn more about how the social media landscape and culture are changing. It includes links to government resources, cool videos, academia, organizations promoting public diplomacy, other public diplomacy-related events and interesting blogs.

iDiplomacy is now on Twitter! Follow us at @iDiplomacy.

We have updated the “Conference Information” with bios of some of the attendees, including distinguished figures in the video game, music and entertainment industries and academia. They include: Danny Bilson, Steven Corman, Steven de Souza, Flint Dille, Frank Gibeau, Danny Goldberg, Ron Goldstein, Peter Marx and John Nee.

Director of Defense Research & Engineering, the Gallup Organization and Visionaire Media will be hosting “iDiplomacy: empowering the private sector and citizen diplomats in the digital age,” a two-day symposium to be held at The Gallup Organization in Washington DC on November 9th and 10th, 2009.

The symposium will examine the evolving role of media and entertainment in public diplomacy due to new technologies, social networks and the democratization of communications. International relations are no longer restricted to governments and the globalization of media now includes consuming, producing and sharing media with people around the world. Every citizen is a diplomat.

iDiplomacy will assess the impact and future influence of modern media and social networking technologies on public and personal diplomacy, and determine how to empower both the public and private sectors and all American citizens to build bridges to other cultures to create a healthier world.

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