First Convening of the Open Measurement Groups (OMG)

In June of 2024, the Internet Intelligence Lab, home of the IODA Project, hosted the first convening of the Open Measurement Groups (OMG) at Georgia Tech.

The event was sponsored by the Open Technology Fund through a contract with M-Lab with the goal of bringing together Internet measurement groups with an established practice of working in the open to collaborate and converge on best practices, methodologies and complementary approaches for the collecting of data around Internet censorship. Participation was invitation only and included IODA, OONI, M-Lab, Censored Planet, and Cloudflare Radar.

The three day event included the following agenda: Day 1 focused on knowledge sharing and improving our understanding of each other’s datasets. Day 2 focused on current cross-cutting efforts to improve techniques related to throttling, censorship event detection, and collaboration during rapid response to a censorship event. Day 3 was an “unconference”, allowing for salient topics that emerged during Day 1 and 2 to be further explored.

Top take-aways:

• Shared Challenges: Throughout Day 2 and Day 3 we were able to identify similar challenges faced across groups that we can better understand through conversation with each other. These challenges included: share points of dependency, blind spots in measuring network interference, needing to identify effective yet responsible rapid response methods.
• Existing Complementary Efforts: Much of the work that the groups are already doing is complementary and supportive of one another’s goals and objectives. During the gathering, groups identified existing collaborative efforts that are working well and considered how these initiatives could be best sustained and scaled.
• Evolution of Projects: Collectively the groups have decades of experience and lessons learned about open Internet measurement. Throughout the convening, groups highlighted different lessons learned and described different iterations of their projects that can only be appreciated reflectively.
• Opportunities for Collaboration: We can approach shared challenges together. In instances where our dependencies or resource constraints overlap, we can collaborate and more effectively overcome shared challenges. Examples include collaboration on censorship reporting, possible sharing infrastructure, developing shared rapid response protocol, or writing a shared theory for change for open measurement groups.

The Internet Intelligence Lab and the IODA Team will host the 2nd OMG convening later in 2024. We have tentatively decided to focus thematically on:

1. Managing a Data Collection and Publication Platform. Many of the groups are working to improve their data pipelines. For example, OONI is working towards a significant update to their data pipeline. In addition to learning more about this update our goal will be to understand each other's data collection to data usage pipeline. 
2. Priorities and Plans for the Year Ahead. In this convening, measurement of throttling was an important discussion topic because many groups had this as a priority. We want to make sure we are sharing our priorities and plans so that we can identify opportunities for collaboration and learning. 
3. Data Analysis Workflows. We will share new research regarding alert systems and censorship detection workflows, but we were not able to cover all organizations or do deep dives. We will use case study events to further describe and understand each other's data analysis workflows.

We were honored to host this convening at Georgia Tech, and we look forward to continued collaboration with our OMG family!

To read the full report download it here.