One thing I’ve wanted for a long time now is a dashboard that helps me track the wide array of tech policy issues I follow. One place where I could check, every morning, to get a sense of what issues are trending & developing, what longer-term issues are brewing, what specific milestones are approaching, and what opportunities there might be for me to get engaged. Something akin to Techmeme + Crunchbase, but focused on policy issues.   I’ve been thinking of this as a “dashboard for internet citizenship”. Here’s what I do, in the absence of such a thing. I read Techdirt and Ars Technica’s Law & Disorder religiously, and I keep an ever-growing Google Reader feed that tracks tech policy thinkers.  And all of this is great. But what I really want is something a bit more structured — that breaks issues down by sector & type (e.g., copyright vs. transportation vs. international, etc.), and understands things like timelines, which are particularly important with policy issues (and which are constantly changing).  And I want something that spans many sources, and is peer produced and peer curated. Last year, I started to prototype a take on this, which I dubbed “Threat Vector” — a simple site for tracking issues and topics, and associating them with news stories:

A demo is running here (code here)- but it’s been sitting in half-baked form for several months now, which is a shame.  I also spent some time last year sketching out a more involved idea for a social network for tech policy, which I could see as growing out of a simpler starting point like Threat Vector. I really want something like this. I’ve taken a few half-starts at it, and have a ton of ideas about how it might work, but haven’t really focused on it.  Maybe there is something like it out there on the web already, but I haven’t found it yet.  Something like this would make a great addition to the Internet Defense League. If anyone is interested in taking this on in some form, I’d be happy to help make it happen.

One thing I’ve wanted for a long time now is a dashboard that helps me track the wide array of tech policy issues I follow. One place where I could check, every morning, to get a sense of what issues are trending & developing, what longer-term issues are brewing, what specific milestones are approaching, and what opportunities there might be for me to get engaged. Something akin to Techmeme + Crunchbase, but focused on policy issues.   I’ve been thinking of this as a “dashboard for internet citizenship”. Here’s what I do, in the absence of such a thing. I read Techdirt and Ars Technica’s Law & Disorder religiously, and I keep an ever-growing Google Reader feed that tracks tech policy thinkers.  And all of this is great. But what I really want is something a bit more structured — that breaks issues down by sector & type (e.g., copyright vs. transportation vs. international, etc.), and understands things like timelines, which are particularly important with policy issues (and which are constantly changing).  And I want something that spans many sources, and is peer produced and peer curated. Last year, I started to prototype a take on this, which I dubbed “Threat Vector” — a simple site for tracking issues and topics, and associating them with news stories:

A demo is running here (code here)- but it’s been sitting in half-baked form for several months now, which is a shame.  I also spent some time last year sketching out a more involved idea for a social network for tech policy, which I could see as growing out of a simpler starting point like Threat Vector. I really want something like this. I’ve taken a few half-starts at it, and have a ton of ideas about how it might work, but haven’t really focused on it.  Maybe there is something like it out there on the web already, but I haven’t found it yet.  Something like this would make a great addition to the Internet Defense League. If anyone is interested in taking this on in some form, I’d be happy to help make it happen.