E-Diplomacy

In November 2020, Switzerland introduced its Digital Foreign Policy Strategy, marking a new phase in its efforts to shape the governance of digital issues. For decades, Switzerland has been at the forefront of international digital developments.

DiploFoundation works on capacity development in the fields of diplomacy, Internet governance, and digital co-operation. Established in 2002 by the governments of Malta and Switzerland, Diplo, among other initiatives, works to improve the role of small and developing states in global diplomacy by:

Title of event: The Potential of Virtual Reality for Peace Mediation

Date 5 Nov 2020 

The Internet, as we know it today, has evolved from a platform of the tech, academic, and research elite, to a tool for the general public, given its wide adoption by the mainstream modern society (Naughton, 2016). Without the benefit of hindsight, few could have predicted the evolution of the Internet and how it’s continuously being shaped by economic and social changes.

By Katarina Andjelkovic, Andrijana Gavrilovic, Natasa Perucica, Katharina Hone, and Jovan Njegic

The artificial intelligence (AI) Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) can write texts on any topic. OpenAI, the organisation that developed and released it as a beta version in June 2020, describes it as a general-purpose application for creating text, ‘allowing users to try it on virtually any English language task’. GPT-3 is a scaling up, by two orders of magnitude, of the previous model released by OpenAI, making it ‘the most powerful natural language processing (NLP) application available today’. 

On 21 September, DiploFoundation launched the humAInism Speech Generator as part of its humAInism project. By combining artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and the expertise of Diplo’s cybersecurity team, this tool is meant to help diplomats and practitioners write speeches on the topic of cybersecurity. 

This year, the 6th South Eastern European Dialogue on Internet Governance (SEEDIG) on 21-25 September 2020 – the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) regional initiative for South Eastern Europe and the neighbouring area – was supposed to hold its sixth annual meeting in Moldova, and the community was looking forward to visiting the famous Moldovan wineries after day-long debates on the region’s digital policy realities and challenges.

Looking back to see the future of digital governance

This year, we celebrate the 15th anniversary of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). For this occasion, as part of the WSIS Forum 2020, a series of high-level discussions are being held between 7–10 September 2020.

Unveiling a series of new events and tools for policy practitioners

There’s more than one reason why September feels fresh. The equinox marks a change in the seasons. Schools, offices, and parliaments resume their work, and the diplomatic calendar kicks off. But this year’s re-entry is like no previous one.