Michael Walsh, Forum One Communications, March 2010

At the recent U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy meeting, participants asked that the Commission better solicit feedback on public diplomacy from the broader community of academic scholars, industry experts, and non-state actors. In response to this call, Michael Walsh of Forum One Communications created a new public diplomacy crowdsourcing site to facilitate the free flow of ideas and discussion outside of the public meetings.

Although this site is not affiliated with the Commission, it provides a free, open, and transparent platform for the bubbling-up of good ideas that the Commission should consider within its mandate. It also has the added benefit of being built on the same platform currently being used by numerous U.S. Government department and agencies (including the Department of State and Department of Defense) to solicit citizen feedback as part of the Open Government Directive.

Contribute your ideas to the public diplomacy site at IdeaScale.com.

Michael Walsh is a project director with Forum One Communications. He served as a senior marketing communications manager for environmental sustainability at Microsoft Corporation. Walsh joined Microsoft after a number of years in the federal government, where he worked as a management consultant and civil servant. These positions allowed him to work closely with government organizations in the United States and abroad, including the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Defense, and Department of State. He is a member of the Young Professionals in Foreign Policy, Public Diplomacy Alumni Association, and American Red Cross.