What We Will Test Next
The 2026 edition is the beginning of an annual research sequence. Diplomats.Digital invites ministries, missions, diplomatic academies, practitioners, researchers, and institutional partners to help test the propositions and tools before the next edition.
Ways to contribute
| Participation route | Contribution |
|---|---|
| Evidence contributor | Provides public documents, corrections, source material, or methodological feedback. |
| Practitioner contributor | Participates in an attributed, anonymised, or confidential structured conversation. |
| Field Kit reviewer | Uses one tool and reports what was clear, unusable, missing, or burdensome. |
| Scenario partner | Participates in a mission–headquarters tabletop exercise. |
| Institutional design partner | Tests selected frameworks or tools in a limited and protected setting. |
| Regional research partner | Supports comparative evidence and interpretation beyond Western institutional models. |
| Technical or academic reviewer | Reviews identity, AI, data, measurement, ethics, or research methodology. |
Confidentiality and independence
Participation should not require public disclosure of internal weakness. Contributions may be public, anonymised, or confidential according to an agreed research arrangement.
No sponsor, provider, or commercial partner should receive confidential institutional material or influence findings without explicit participant consent. Research participation should not be used as a disguised sales route.
The public commitment
The next edition will report what strengthened the 2026 thesis, what complicated it, which assumptions were revised, and which questions remain unresolved.
The purpose is not to prove that the first edition was right. It is to improve the institutional understanding of digital diplomacy through evidence, challenge, use, and revision.
Evidence and citation record · 2 sourcesClose evidence and citation record
Evidence and citation record
Source IDs follow the Technical and Evidence Annex citation map. Conceptual models developed by Diplomats.Digital are analytical propositions, not externally validated standards.
- Diplomats.DigitalDigital Diplomacy Capability Framework
Cited in this section as S19 in the Technical and Evidence Annex citation map.
- Diplomats.DigitalDigital Diplomacy Operating Framework
Cited in this section as S20 in the Technical and Evidence Annex citation map.
Source status: Citation records and publication links were checked for Edition 1.0 at publication. Subsequent corrections are recorded through the version history.
Suggested citation
Diplomats.Digital (2026). State of Digital Diplomacy 2026: From Communication to Capability. Edition 1.0. Section: What We Will Test Next.