M-Lab Organizes and Participates in the First Open Measurement Gathering (OMG)

From June 11th-13th, 2024, Measurement Lab (M-Lab) organized and participated in the first of four convenings that will take place over the course of the Open Measurement Gatherings (OMG) project. The inaugural event was planned in collaboration with the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA) project at Georgia Tech’s Internet Intelligence Lab, where the event was also hosted.

The OMG project is funded by the Open Technology Fund (OTF) and is an opportunity for participating open Internet and censorship measurement groups to coordinate more closely and become more knowledgeable about one another’s work. The goal of the OMG project is to increase trust and coordination between Internet measurement groups so that we can support the Internet Freedom community more sustainably and efficiently. With this motivation in mind, the events are organized with the following principles:

• Learning in the open: To enhance trust with the wider Internet freedom community, the OMG convenings share work and solicit feedback openly.

• Impact centered research: To mitigate the decentering of the people most impacted by Internet disruption events, the covenings will consider how our research and capabilities could be useful to those “on-the-ground”.

• Better together: Collaboration is essential to the Internet freedom community’s goals. The convenings are designed with the belief that no group or individual can do it alone.

• Collaborative learning environment: To improve trust and coordination among Internet measurement groups, the OMG convenings foster a tone of humility and kindness.

M-Lab, IODA, Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), Censored Planet will participate in all four convenings along with relevant experts from the Internet freedom and network research community, such as Cloudflare Radar, who joined us as a guest for our first event.

On Day 1 the convening focused on knowledge sharing and improving an understanding of each other’s datasets and organizations. Day 2 concentrated 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 structured as an “unconference”, and allowed salient topics that emerged during Day 1 and 2 to be further explored.

A forthcoming public report about the first OMG convening will have more details regarding the findings and outcomes.

If you’d like to know more about the OMG project, please reach out to hello@measurementlab.net.