Summary

  • Preparing for 6G and reaching people excluded from digital opportunities are different jobs. ITU's questions ask candidates for five elected management posts to explain what they would do, not merely endorse both ambitions.
  • Answers are invited by 23 October 2026 at 23:59 CET, within 1,000 words in total, excluding the questions. Member States will vote; readers need clear answers and care over what a missing one means.

What does better connectivity mean to someone still unable to use digital services? Probably not a speech about the next wireless generation. That distance — between building what comes next and reaching people who are already being left behind — runs through ITU's questions to candidates for its five elected management posts.

One questionnaire asks about the transition to 6G and challenges in space. Another asks what candidates would do for people excluded from digital opportunities, particularly in the least developed countries. These are separate responsibilities, not a choice to abandon one for the other. But anyone claiming to serve a shared digital future should be able to explain who their plan would help and how.

The interview gives them limited room to do it: three priorities, a plan for achieving them, and no more than a thousand words for all the answers together. There is no room for a book-length detour through a candidate's career.

For readers who do not speak the language of diplomatic communiqués, the small print is unusually helpful. The interview instructions ask for plain writing, few acronyms and an explanation when one is needed. Footnotes and hyperlinks are out. Candidates may use any of ITU's six official languages, preferably the one in which they write most comfortably. A reader should not need to chase a stack of campaign documents to discover what an answer says.

Those rules do not guarantee a revealing answer. A compact slogan is still a slogan. But a common limit gives candidates less room to bury the choices behind their priorities, and readers a more manageable basis for comparison.

Five jobs, different things to explain

The opening question is shared; the rest follows the job. Candidates for Secretary-General are asked about cooperation beyond 2030, artificial intelligence and ITU's contribution amid UN reform. The Deputy Secretary-General questions bring the discussion inside the institution: how to get the three Bureaux and General Secretariat working together, and make results and accountability matter.

The differences become clearer at bureau level. The Radiocommunication Bureau set asks about the transition to 6G and challenges in outer space. The Telecommunication Standardization Bureau set asks how standards can keep pace with technology, including international cooperation on AI standards. The Telecommunication Development Bureau candidates must address people left outside digital opportunities and the needs of least developed countries.

For a reader trying to work out whether a plan takes exclusion seriously, the useful passage will be the one that explains a route from an ambition to a result. For someone working on technical standards, it may be the account of how countries can cooperate rather than talk past one another. Neither reader is well served by a list of fashionable technologies. Nor should either mistake the questions for commitments: asking about 6G promises no launch date, and asking about AI does not create a standard.

An invitation is not a received answer

The published timetable follows the 12 October nomination deadline. Questions were scheduled to go to candidates' personal email addresses on 13 October; responses are invited by Friday, 23 October, at 23:59 CET, using the time-zone label printed by ITU. The page supplies a schedule, not email delivery receipts. It describes an invitation, not a compulsory test.

The candidate roster helps identify who is standing for each office. A biography or campaign brochure there is not, by itself, a response to this interview. Nor do the interview instructions and election procedures explain a public system for distinguishing an answer not submitted from one received but not yet posted, or for identifying a late reply. That is a gap in the described process, not proof that answers do not exist elsewhere.

That matters to the reader who came looking for a plan, not an election calendar. An empty space might look like indifference to a difficult question when the answer is waiting to be posted. Or there may be no answer. Without knowing which, the reader cannot fairly judge whether a candidate has confronted the problem or avoided it.

The election guide puts the eventual decision elsewhere: Member States each have one vote, subject to voting rights and accredited delegations. Elections for the senior posts are scheduled to begin in Doha on 12 November. Reading an interview gives nobody an extra ballot. It can still make the argument less remote: who has a credible plan for the next network, who has one for those left outside today's digital opportunities, and what exactly are they proposing to do? A thousand words will not solve those problems. They should at least make the choices visible.