Hi Harsh,
Thanks for this introduction and for your contributions so far.
It's great to have you involved in the project.
Niels or Davide would be better able to represent the work going on at Datactive [1].
I can talk about ideas we've been tossing around at Berkeley's School of Information [2] and with a contact at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) [3].
* CDT has confirmed an interest in measuring the effectiveness of civil society in pushing the public interest agenda in the IETF. One project we may work on is finding several cases of public interest related topics, including both advocacy 'successes' and advocacy 'failures', and try to map out how communications played out in each case. The goal for this project would be ideally be to get strategic insight into effective organizing around these kinds of issues.
* I have a research interest in the statistical modeling of communication networks in general. This is related to some of the more advocacy based research but could also be seen as a study in applied math. I am hoping to use BigBang to develop some novel modeling and analysis algorithms for communications metadata.
* An idea that just occurred to me the other day that could be interest which I haven't discussed with anybody yet.... We could also look at crossing data from Internet Governance lists with another data set and see what comes up. I'm thinking specifically the
Panama Papers. It's just possible we could detect the influence of offshore finance on Internet governance. That would be quite a find.
Just a few ideas. The project is at this point very open ended. I'd really like to hear more about the work you did for CIS, if you don't mind sharing.
All best,
Seb