OMG! Measurement Lab organized the second Open Measurement Gathering
The second Open Measurement Gathering took place in December 2024, organized by Measurement Lab (M-Lab) in collaboration with and hosted by the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA) project at Georgia Tech’s Internet Intelligence Lab. For the second convening, the OMG groups focused on deepening the understanding of one another’s work in order to be champions of one another and collectively address shared challenges.
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.
During the three-day convening, four key issues emerged as areas for collaboration among the OMG groups:
Uncertainty about the funding landscape With big changes in political leadership across the world, historic sources of funding for each group were no longer certain to remain. Donors/sponsors may change their mandates and OMG groups will need to be prepared to find new funding sources or adapt.
Evolving Infrastructural Constraints As Internet measurement datasets continue to grow, they will demand increasing resources to maintain and make available to the public. In addition, new technologies such as AI put further strain on finite resources in infrastructure. OMG groups may need to adapt what kind of data they make publicly available and how they store archived data.
Infrastructure Resilience The platforms and data for OMG groups are vulnerable to several risks such as: DDOS attacks, blocks from adversarial governments, and software dependencies, insufficient staff, and data losses. Each groups’ threats are unique, but sharing the challenges and risks helped highlight common areas where OMG groups can build collaboration to increase resilience.
Theory of Change for an open Internet All OMG groups agreed that their ultimate goal is a free, open, transparent, accountable, resilient, equitable Internet. During the initial Theory of Change discussion, each group shared a scenario of how to achieve that ultimate goal in a broad sense, exploring individual action and social conditions that it would require. In a breakout session during the Unconference Day, select participants went through a Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat (SWOT) analysis to expose entry points for OMG groups to achieve their shared vision. OMG groups will continue the conversation in OMG 3 to better refine a shared Theory of Change which will inform future collaboration.
In the next convening, the OMG groups will focus on the opportunities to meet the challenges mentioned above and how to deepen collaboration to ultimately strengthen the Internet measurement community. If you want to know more, read the public report for details!
