The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report this week titled “Engaging Foreign Audiences: Assessment of Public Diplomacy Platforms Could Help Improve State Department Plans to Expand Engagement.” The report recommends that the Secretary of State and the Office of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs “conduct an assessment of the relative effectiveness of each of State’s overseas outreach platforms, such as by measuring how each platform has expanded engagement with foreign audiences.”

(Tijana Milosevic, Public Policy Intern for the Public Diplomacy Council, compiled this report.)

The U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy held a public meeting yesterday to discuss measurement tools used in the evaluation of U.S. government public diplomacy efforts.

Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith McHale was in Nairobi, Kenya, this week to announce the launch of a new competition called Apps4Africa, Computerworld Kenya reports: “The contest, which will run till end of August, challenges local coders and software developers to create software tools that will meet the needs of citizens across East Africa.”

The United States should look to increase its soft power influence on Muslim-majority countries though “its open intellectual culture, its great universities, [and] its capacity for discovery and innovation,” Ahmed Zewail, White House science envoy to the Middle East, writes in the Los Angeles Times:

At a Brookings Institution forum last week, many participants argued that international volunteering is an integral component of “smart power,” as well as a cost-effective way to promote intercultural understanding. [Full transcript and audio available here.]

As more than 7,000 international education and exchange professionals descended last week on downtown Kansas City for the 2010 Annual NAFSA Conference and Expo, the editorial board of the Kansas City Star took note, publishing an op-ed in support of international exchange:

A group of Russian high school basketball players arrived in Washington for the “first exchange under the bilateral presidential commission, a mechanism established by U.S. President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, during their summit in Moscow in July 2009,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported. The 13-15 year old students were treated to a shootaround with President Obama on the White House basketball court.

“I’m…asking you to keep being you, to keep doing what you’re doing. Just take it global,” First Lady Michelle Obama advised George Washington University’s graduating class of 2010 during her commencement address this past Sunday:

Following up on a pledge in President Obama’s June 2009 Cairo speech, the Departments of State and Commerce convened earlier this week the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship.

The Obama administration is “shifting the focus of public diplomacy efforts to play down” emphasis on violent extremism in order to avoid offending foreign audiences, the Washington Times reports: