We’re here at the MIT Knight Civic Media Conference, where Alberto Ibarguen and John Bracken have just announced the winners of the latest news challenge, which asked the question “How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation?” Sands Fish and I were there to liveblog the presentation of grantees.
The Global Censorship Measurement project from the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation Measurement Lab, is collaboration that hosts a suite of tools to help the open internet. It’s by Ben Scott, Thomas Gideon, and Alan Davidson.
How can we understand what happens when our Internet connection doesn’t work how we expect it to work? It might be a student in Boston struggling to get access to the DPLA because of a slow internet connection. It might be an activist in Egypt who can’t get access to critical materials in the lead-up to an election. It might be a journalist in Pakistan or Turkey or China who can’t post videos to the internet.
In isolation, it’s hard to tell what’s happening with our Internet connections. What if we could actually collect the data from thousands or millions of users about their experiences. What if we could know that a slow connection is resulting from a limited connection from an ISP, government censorship, or a problem with the Internet.
M-Lab is a crowd-sourced platform for collecting information about internet access. They run tests on a network of 150 servers that have been placed around the world. Contributors can also use their own computers to add information and find out what’s going on with their Internet.
Each month, the M-Lab is running around a half a million tests. The most popular test is the network speed test, showing how fast your Internet connection is going. “The idea is not to create graphs, but to create knowledge that is actionable.” Examples include How Neutral Is The Net?” which shows where throttling is happening around the world, and GlasViz, which shows where the top throttlers are for a particular kind of service.
The Future: M-Lab in Action
The New America Foundation is now transitioning Measurement Lab from a platform that is used by developers, into a platform that can be used by policy-makers, advocates, and journalists. This grant will specifically help improve the user experience.
M-lab is now trying to figure out how to figure out how to expand the user base. He urges us to run one of M-Lab’s tests. In doing this, we add our data to help researchers understand what is happening on the net.