IODA Gives a Sneak Peek of Upcoming Improvements at Open Measurement Gathering
On June 25, 2025, IODA participated in the 3rd Open Measurement Gathering (OMG), which for the first time, featured a live and virtual AMA event. Hosted by Censored Planet and joined by M-Lab and OONI, the online convening brought together digital rights advocates and researchers to share progress, challenges, and ideas for improving Internet measurement in service of Internet freedom.
IODA’s participation in OMG3 provided an opportunity to tell the community about the upcoming changes and latest resources released on the platform. By continuing to advance open tools for outage detection and prioritizing accessibility for researchers, Internet freedom advocates and journalists, IODA remains a vital open data platform in the community of open Internet measurement projects.
IODA's live session during the 3rd Open Measurement Gathering on June 25, 2025.
New updates from IODA
IODA's presentation offered a thorough overview of its platform’s current capabilities, upcoming website usability improvements, and new data—all centered around a core mission: providing open, near-real-time visibility into Internet connectivity disruptions that can support journalists, Internet freedom advocates and policymakers responding to Internet connectivity interference and shutdowns.
Since its last public update, IODA’s team delivered several major improvements to its website and dashboard. IODA now offers more granular level data of where Internet outages are happening at national, regional, and AS levels. The upgrade was coupled with a redesign of the dashboard navigation which was designed with both technical and non-technical users in mind, making complex network signals more readable and actionable. This involved working with Georgia Tech students and URA Design to improve usability of the dashboard through user-centered design.
IODA also published a User Resource Hub on its website with the aim to help users understand the platform better. The curated set of resources from the team includes tutorials, research, glossary terms, repositories, and data sources. Each resource is tagged for specific user community needs.
What’s next for IODA?
Looking ahead, IODA shared its roadmap for the future. This includes even greater geographical resolution, multilingual support, enhanced alert customization, and more accessible visualizations. The team is also discussed their curated dataset of IODA outages which includes start time, end time, location, and known causes where possible—like fiber cuts, regulatory interventions, or natural disasters. All of these efforts tie back to IODA’s commitment to strengthening open, community-driven Internet measurement in service of accountability and transparency.
More specifically, the team provided an update on IODA’s new data release plans for the future:
- Active Probing Latency and Loss - IODA will help detect generalized throttling using IODA’s Active Probing collectors, by recording Latency (round trip time) and Probe Response/Loss (did the recipient reply / did the response make it back to IODA?).
- Upstream Delay - IODA’s traceroute data will provide both delay and path information that will only be available at the ASN/ISP level.
- Power Outage Data - IODA’s new pilot project scrapes publicly available global power outage data. The aim is to help researchers more easily determine the causation of Internet disruption by potentially ruling out power outages with this data.
- Localization - IODA is developing a contribution system to enhance and support its localization
- Automating Outage Detection Documentation - IODA is exploring the use of LLMs to automate outage detection documentation and save the team time.
IODA - Ask Me Anything - OMG3
Overall, IODA is working to make its tools more responsive to community needs. During the AMA Q&A session, which had a total of 60 people at any point, the team emphasized its focus on public collaboration—inviting feedback on the new dashboard features and offering support for integrating IODA data into advocacy workflows. As part of this effort, IODA is improving documentation and has introduced APIs for external developers and researchers. The team also welcomed requests for collaboration on localized reports and new regional monitoring needs.
More about OMG
OMG3 was sponsored by the Open Technology Fund with the goal of bringing together Internet and censorship 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. Participating OMG projects include IODA, OONI, M-Lab, Censored Planet.
We look forward to continued collaboration with our OMG family!
To read the full report, click here.
Summaries and links to each group’s presentation:
