Warren Wright from Gallup Organization talked about the Gallup World Poll, which represents about 97 percent of the world’s population. He also explained the origins of the poll, which came about during President Bush’s administration and owe a lot to a remark by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

“Donald Rumsfeld was being interviewed after 9/11, and someone in CNN actually asked him,  ‘Secretary Rumsfeld, what is going on here? Can you tell me what Muslims are thinking? Or what do you think?’ And [the] secretary said, ‘How should I know? It’s not like you can do a Gallup poll of the Muslim world.’ So our CEO actually called up our Princeton office and said ‘Can we do that?’ And lo and behold, we started what is now the largest [polling] effort in the world.”

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We’re at Gallup headquarters in downtown Washington DC with an hour to go before the start.

It’s going to begin with a welcome from Ben Riley, Principal Deputy, Rapid Fielding, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and chairman of iDiplomacy. Jerome Gary, the moderator of iDiplomacy and chairman of Visionaire Media, is going to be discussing the semantics of public diplomacy.

Warren Wright from Gallup will be discussing perceptions of the United States around the world and Matt Armstrong, blogger of mountainrunner.us, will be presenting the history of public diplomacy. Although there’s good representation from government, not everyone attending has a public diplomacy background — there are screenwriters, (video) gamers, and people from the tech industry in attendance too. 

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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.”