Finland became the first country in the world to unveil a collection of national emojis in December, 2015. Finland is set to become the first country in the world to have its own country-themed emojis added to the Unicode Standard. [...] are likely to be introduced to the emoji keyboards of smart devices around the world next June.

Moses Machipisa's project MaYouth Civic Education Initiative uses WhatsApp to build circles of civic training. Nicolas is a member of Project Friends Chile, a pioneering cultural diplomacy project which aims for the development of co-existence and social consciousness, by inculcating Civic Education to children and youngsters through digital media. 

We are already past the midway mark in our new Hacking for Diplomacy course at Stanford [...] Having logged more than 550 interviews of potential beneficiaries, the teams have delved deep into understanding the problems sourced from the State Department. The challenges are tough - such as how to improve data on refugees who go missing or perish on their journeys, and how to better evaluate the effectiveness of peacekeeping forces. 

When the world’s nations sit down to talk nowadays, there is a distinct difference to the way diplomacy is done. Influence is no longer defined only by special relationships and old alliances, but which WhatsApp group you are invited into. The rise of WhatsApp diplomacy is transforming the negotiating chamber. 

DFID has launched a 'frontier technology hub' aimed at helping its staff spot, fund and disseminate technologies to support the agency's development programmes. The three-year Frontier Technology Livestreaming initiative was launched this week (1 November) at the agency's headquarters in London, United Kingdom, along with a report that singles out 10 technologies that fit its definition of 'frontier'.

A new report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, “Communication Breakdown: Unraveling the Islamic State’s Media Efforts,” describes in detail the impact of military action on ISIS’ capacity to wage ideological warfare. Promising the coming of the caliphate and portraying the Islamic State as utopian reality about to happen has become all but impossible.

“With the advent of blockchain becoming on stream, we saw its potential in 2010 and 2011,” Thompson said. “You could have something that could intermediate in the distribution of the international aid with full traceability.” In 2012, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke about the seriously worrying levels of aid corruption globally.

This month, the Chinese government plans to introduce codes for some 3,000 Chinese characters as part of a grand project, known as the China Font Bank, to digitize 500,000 characters previously unavailable in electronic form. Until now, only 80,388 characters have been encoded in the international computing standard, Unicode.