Great news for the Civindex project. Right after I wrote here about the idea of creating an index to measure personal activist participation on the internet, I received an interesting message on the comments section: “Hi Andre, I came across this interesting post. I found this idea intriguing. I am also conducting some research on similar topics. Why don’t we have a chat on this?”

It turned out to be a message from Stefano de Paoli, an Italian researcher from the

After some difficulty in finding a common time for this chat, we ended up talking, earlier this week, and decided to work together on the project.

Next step will be to write a proposal to see if we get some seed money to develop a prototype for our index measurement tool. Stefano has a student writing a summary of the existing measurement tools, besides klout, with their methodologies and limitations. I’m starting to talk with programmers about the technical challenges of the initiative. It would be great to have a tech person to join the project, so I’m going to put up an ad at Harvard’s Innovation Lab, to see if anyone is interested.

Overall, I am very excited with the developments so far!