Spotlight on the Open Technology Institute: A Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow Host

Last month’s MozFest 2014 provided us a welcome opportunity to think about what we at New America’s Open Technology Insititute hope to do over the next year as one of the few organizations lucky enough to host a Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow during that fellowship program’s inaugural year. At OTI, we are committed to freedom and social justice in the digital age. To achieve these goals, we engage in policy debates, build technology, and work with communities to understand needs, test tools and build alternative models of infrastructure. And we are looking for a passionate maker to help us with our work in 2015--in particular, to help make more transparent the workings of the Internet and the companies that offer services over it.

This post is cross-posted on the Mozilla Advocacy Blog

So much of what impacts our online experience happens without us seeing it, making it easy to overlook. For example, look at the Net Neutrality debate, where decisions made at interconnection points deep in the network have both business and policy implications. At OTI, we have tools that allow us to dig into the technical depths of the issue through our Measurement Lab platform, and we recently published a major report laying out much of that data. But we need help figuring out how to make this information more available and more clear so that policy experts, advocates, industry professionals and everyday internet users can understand what interconnection is, how it works, and how it affects the online experience. We've started on one of these efforts by working on a visualization tool that we're calling the Measurement Lab Observatory, but there's so much more we can do with the Measurement Lab data, as well as the platform and tools to make it more accessible to everyone--if only we can find the right fellow.

With the help of the participants at our MozFest usability workshop, we thought about other ways to get people involved in Internet measurement such as building a network troubleshooting tool that could generate new M-Lab data while also testing your connection. We also talked about developing out our Firefox Browser extension to have different themes depending on a user's needs, such as a journalist or advocate dashboard which includes recent news about Internet policy issues, or a “notebook” app with which Internet citizen scientists can run and annotate tests as part of the M-Lab research team. These are just the types of ideas that we’re hoping our incoming Ford-Mozilla Fellow can run with.

On the policy and governance side, there's also a lot more that we could be doing to reveal what happens behind the scenes between governments and Internet companies. Many companies now publish "Transparency Reports" that include information about how and when governments ask for user’s data. However, there’s no standardization in how companies report, making it hard to meaningfully combine or compare the data from different companies--and hard for new companies to get into the reporting game. Therefore, and building on some our previous research and education efforts around transparency reporting, we’re launching in 2015 a project called the Transparency Reporting Toolkit. We’re going to build a web portal filled with best practices information and tools to help companies create and upload reports in a standardized way, and tools for others to mash up and visualize the data from multiple companies’ reports. OTI’s technologists and data visualization experts are gearing up to build out those tools, but it’s a big project and we could use some help--possibly yours.

Ultimately, we can only make good policy with good information and we can only get good information--and, crucially, understand that information--with good tools. So we’re ready to move forward on all of these projects in 2015, full steam ahead, and all we need now is the right technologist to help us make those tools. If that sounds exciting to you, apply to be a 2015 Open Web Fellow and work with us and the Mozilla community to help build new windows into the technical and political depths of the Internet.