Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will announce a new U.S. Water Partnership (USWP) in Washington D.C. on Thursday, March 22 at 10:30 a.m. The USWP is a public-private partnership formed to share U.S. knowledge, leverage and mobilize resources...

The mission of public diplomacy is generally described as seeking to “understand, engage, inform and influence” foreign publics and elites in support of national policy objectives. Public diplomacy has been practiced, in one form or another, for a long time...

At the end of November 2010, the world did a diplomatic double-take when WikiLeaks, a not-for-profit media organization released confidential U.S. diplomatic cables.

And the ambitions go further: to use Scottish Water’s land for wind-power generation, to export water technology (it already does so, to Canada) and what it grandly calls “water diplomacy”. At one level this seems to mean Scottish Water’s support for the international charity WaterAid, helping with water projects in Africa and other poor parts of the world.

The framework does have an interesting reference on closer coordination and collaboration between State and Defense: ”where DOD runs public-facing websites, we have developed closer coordination with State on editorial oversight and content selection.” This may mean State, likely the regional bureaus to be specific, has input to Defense-run sites.

The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ (ECA) SportsUnited division announced a basketball exchange program that will send four Zimbabweans -- three teenage girls and a coach -- to the United States for twelve-days of dynamic activities as part of the new Empowering Women and Girls through Sports Initiative.

While visiting Iceland for an online marketing conference last week, I found myself in the president of Iceland’s living room, scratching my head at how welcoming and eager he was to talk about the country’s use of social media and technology to rebuild the nation.

Public Diplomacy is one of the new trends in international relations. To begin, let’s settle on a simple definition of Public Diplomacy, “that element of diplomacy that involves a government reaching out to a public, rather than to another government.”