Now it’s time to look into the future a bit, to see what trends public diplomacy may face in the coming decades, and then I will stop and take questions.

My belief, given the geopolitical trends already underway, is that we will be seeing governments engaging in more public diplomacy, not less. Furthermore, I believe that openness, or transparency as it’s fashionably called, will become a more common attribute of governments, businesses and international organizations. Along with transparency will blossom collaboration and less hierarchical processes of governing, less top-down decision-making and more bottom-up and collaborative policy-making. Public opinion will demand it. I heard recently of an example of how this might look: a White House advisor recently was tasked with developing guidelines for regulating a certain kind of international commerce. Rather than drafting what he and his experts thought best and then sending it up the chain of command, he first posted it on the White House Website for comment and input from whomever was interested. The result was a set of guidelines far better than any closed-circuit team could have devised, plus he had buy-in thanks to the collaborative approach. Even better, enough people and governments had seen the guidelines that they started developing compatible regulations themselves.

The next prediction is that successful leaders in international endeavors will themselves become more adept at using the tools of pubic diplomacy to gain support for their positions. Public diplomacy will no longer be a job just for certain specialists, like press attaches and cultural attaches. Nearly everybody in an embassy will be engaged in public diplomacy, especially the Ambassador and other senior officers. There will, however, still be public diplomacy specialists, and they will be people who combine the skills of systems managers, modern librarians, publishers, database experts, marketers and cultural interpreters. They will advise the whole embassy team about how to target, distribute, differentiate and authenticate information so it is as useful as possible. In parallel to this trend, I expect that there will be a decreasing need to classify and restrict information. The dynamic of everything about transparency in government and the culture of the information revolution argues for openness.

The future will assuredly bring us further advances in the amount of information available and reductions in its cost. Andrew Grove, the brilliant head of Intel Corporation, has said about technology, "What can be done will be done." Technology will become so simple and universal that it will "disappear," much as books and telephones do for most of us now. The vehicle is simply not threatening or even important. These developments will result in the death of distance as an important factor in modern communications. The world will sort itself out into three major time and work zones, the Americas, Europe/Africa, and Asia. Already, software companies are employing workers in these three zones to keep projects going around the clock.

In this fast-moving environment, the people who know how to choose, sort, edit, and authenticate information will become extremely valuable. I don’t mean only in diplomatic services, of course, but throughout the workforce. The sought-after experts will be what we now are beginning to call "knowledge workers." And the institutions and nations that lead or play an influential role in the information revolution will have the advantage, the power, and the rewards.